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Daedelus+Salva
The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’ 1990 novel, spawned steampunk, thereby outfitting your local baristas with twirly mustaches and pocket watches. Surprisingly, it’s a delightful read regardless, envisioning a fantastical Victorian-era England where computers are invented a century early. Daedelus has been campaigning for his own spin-off since the early ‘00s: Of Snowdonia, […]
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Blurred Visionaries
In the early 1990s, some of us made a name for ourselves pontificating about the liberating potentials of the Internet and digital technology. We saw a digital revolution that ultimately would free information by making it difficult for powerful forces to keep secrets, empower every man and woman to communicate their visions without the intervention […]
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E-Bombs Away! Protest, Panic, and the Politics of Packet Monkeys
WASHINGTON—”Cyberterrorists” launch an infowar. “Vandals” attack the Web. “Hackers” are on the loose. Anyone who read last week’s newspaper headlines got a crash course in media hysteria. It was the Web’s first fumble. When hackers slowed service on major dot-coms, The New York Times panicked, CNN beamed coverage around the clock, and Clinton called a […]
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Bio Hazard
Smarter, funnier, and more “meta” than the overhyped David Foster Wallace novel, Infinite Jest, Bruce Sterling’s Distraction doesn’t suffer the genre-inferiority complex Wallace labored under when he and his publishers used the marketing term metafiction for what was clearly a routine bit of science fictional extrapolation. Sterling is proud to work within the literary genre […]