Bruce Sterling Quotes

Centralized bureaucracies always protect the status quo. They don’t innovate. And it’s innovation that’s the real threat.

Real life was where the baby was.

Science fiction is a pop medium and a very obsolescent medium...science fiction has a hard time wrapping itself in the traditional mantle of literary excellence... we try to do this sometimes, but generally we have to be really drunk first.

As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming acute.
The most effective political actors on the planet now are people who want to blow themselves up.
These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the morning and face another unpredictable day.

You know what that is? That’s peasant technology, brother. It’s slash-and-burn agriculture. You know what that might do to what’s left of the planet’s tropical forests? It’ll make every straw-hat Brazilian into Paul Bunyan, that’s what. The most dangerous bio-tech in the world is a guy with a goat and an axe.

When the People march in one direction, it only hurts to ask awkward questions.

Clearly, Mother de Gupta dearly loved motherhood – mostly, for the chance that it offered her to boss around small, helpless people.

For God's sake don't put my books into the Thomas Edison kinetoscope... don't tie my words and my thoughts to the fate of a piece of hardware, because hardware is even more mortal than I am, and I'm a hell of a lot more mortal than I care to be.

Believe me there are few things deader or more obsolescent than a science fiction novel that predicts the future when the future has passed it by.

I'm sure you could play some kind of computer game with very intelligent, very small, invisible computers...You could have some entertaining way to play with them, or more likely they would have some entertaining way to play with you.

This <nowiki>[deconstruction]</nowiki> is a way for modern literateurs to handle this vast legacy of the past without actually getting any of the sticky stuff on you. It's like it's dead. It's like the next best thing to not having literature at all.

Revolutions. New Orders. For Laura the words had the cobwebby taste of twentieth-century thinking. Visionary mass movements were all over the 1900s, and whenever they broke through, blood followed in buckets.

I don't think that as a culture today we're very interested in tradition or continuity. No, we're a lot more interested in being a New Age and a revolutionary epoch, we long to reinvent ourselves every morning before breakfast and never grow old.

My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in direct competition with Homer and Euripides.

You know when it really got bad here? When they tried to help. With medicine. And irrigation. They sank deep wells, with sweet, flowing water, and of course the nomads settled there. So instead of moving their herds on, leaving the pastures a chance to recover, they ate everything down to bare rock, for miles around every well. And the eight, nine children that African women have born from time immemorial—they all lived. It wasn’t that the world didn’t care. They struggled heroically, for generations, selflessly and nobly. To achieve an atrocity.