I conducted the following interview at Chattacon in January 2000. Knowing that Bruce Sterling was involved in publishing zines earlier in his career, I inquired about the possibility of getting an interview with him. He agreed, and after we found the bar to be far too loud for a good interview, we adjourned to a handy conference room. The luxurious leather chairs made it easy to get comfortable, and it wasn't long before I had the tape recorder going.
Rev. Bob: Let me get my "cheat sheet" out here....
Bruce Sterling: Sure.
RLH: Well, let me get the obvious out of the way. I'm sure you get asked your opinions on computers, the Net, the Web, why we didn't go boom on New Year's Eve...do you have a standard rap?
BS: Oh, no, nobody's asked me about the New Year's Eve thing. It turned out to be the Kohoutek of computer disasters. I was fairly seriously worried about it. I didn't stockpile fifty pounds of rice and buy a shotgun or anything, but, you know, enough people who were in the industry whose opinion I respected seemed to be really fretful about it that I thought, "Well, you know, something's gonna go down." My own suspicion would be that there will be stuff happening later when we sort of least expect it, like mid-June we'll have something embarrassing. But other than that, what is this, a couple of weeks go by now, and I don't know anyone who's been seriously inconvenienced by Y2K. When people asked me about it beforehand, I would use examples of stuff that had happened that I thought was much worse than Y2K, like when a huge ice storm hit Ontario or Quebec. It took out all the city, just smashed the electrical infrastructure, and nobody starved, anarchy in the streets did not break out. And not only computers, they didn't have any power, so they were obviously worse off than they'd have been if they'd just had a bug. But clearly, if a city full of computers has gone dead, then there ought to be an enormous ripple effect throughout the world's economy, blah blah blah, as they always said. And those ripple effects clearly simply didn't exist. Then I thought the single best example of a Y2K-like disaster was the bombing of Serbia. For guys who were really into infrastructure, and had the means to destroy infrastructure, and had been watching it for months and making these elaborate plans, took out the country and bridges, railroads, power stations, call stations, telephone switching centers - post offices, even. Absolutely, they just tore the infrastructure apart like a cook deboning a chicken. Sortie after sortie, dumb bombs, smart bombs, cruise missiles, and you know, did they rebel? Did they even starve? And worst of all, they didn't even throw out Milosevic, who was the cause of all this suffering, so how big a deal could it have been, objectively speaking?
RLH: What I always figured was that the people with the most to lose had the most resources to throw at the problem.
BS: Well, it's easy to do Monday-morning quarterbacking now, but quite frankly, if you were interviewing me now and there'd been a disaster on January the First, I would've been saying, "Oh yeah, I kept reading these guys, you know, So-and-so and So-and-so said, and such-and-such, and man, am I ever glad I bought those candles!" Because I did, in fact, buy some candles.
RLH: Now, did you not go out and buy a shotgun because you didn't think you needed one, or because you thought you already had one?
BS: I'll tell you, the most intense reason for not buying a shotgun is that I didn't think it would improve my security. My feeling was, talking to people about it, that whatever we had in the way of SWAT teams and Special Forces in my home town were going to obliterate anybody who put his head up over the parapet on January Second. And believe me, if the lights had gone out, there'd been a grinding crash all through Austin, Texas, you would've seen the Austin police department's rapid response team and the Texas Rangers and probably the National Guard all over the place, blowing away anyone who looked like a threat. There would've been curfews, this, that, and the other, and I was a hell of a lot more scared of those guys than I am of some imaginary horde of survivalists who are, you know, running around trying to find canned pork-and-beans. They're an imaginary threat, whereas a nervous cop with a gun is a very serious threat.
RLH: Something else, on the Internet and the Web: you see, increasingly, what looks like a lower-than-expected degree of literacy. You know, lower case, overuse of the letter "Z", just sloppy writing for what is effectively a purely literate culture. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.
BS: Well, I remember that when I first found out about the world of IRC, I thought, "Well, I'm going to go find a relay chat where people can punctuate, where they speak in complete paragraphs." It's silly to think that people are going to speak that way on the Internet; it's like imaginint that people on CB radio are going to be reciting John Milton. You could go around on CB radio reciting sonnets. It's like, "Hey, good buddy, you got your ears on?" "Uh, yes, I do." "Well, have you ever heard Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'? It's a really good poem, you know?" But the media just doesn't suit itself to that. In the case of email, you get email, you read it in fifteen seconds, and you respond in forty-five, tops, get on to the next message - and in those circumstances, to hell with typography! It's a very temporary thing.
RLH: I've even seen it as far as Web pages, things that are built to last.
BS: I don't think Web pages are built to last. If I was doing a William Morris typographic book, I'd be sure there were no misprints, but if I'm just slapping up a Web page which may run under Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0, but not 5.0, or it may run under Netscape something-or-other, but not something-or-other else, exactly how much energy am I going to put into this stuff? I mean, a Web site requires a lot of energy, but I think it's better suited to trying to keep the data up-to-date, not making sure every semicolon is in place.
RLH: True enough. Now, something you did in Holy Fire is what looks like, if I read you right, sort of a decrease in the power of the government as an overriding force and more of a taking of power by individuals and by special-interest groups. Is that something you see happening, or something that may happen that you used for the story, or what?
BS: Well, no, I don't think government's ever had that much power to really affect events. I think what governments have are really good reputations, and that the President, when you people really respected the President, the President was somebody you never saw. When people were really, really amazingly impressed by the Prime Minister, he was an aristocrat, and would never mingle with you because of, you know, caste differences. Whereas, if you can see the President more or less every day and you hear about the President and his sexual pecadillos, and people are scaring up politicians' backgrounds and looking at everything in their personal lives, it becomes clear that they're just human beings like you and me. And in that case, you just don't have that kind of semireligious awe for authority figures. I think that is a healthy development, but my personal feeling is that, say, I respect Franklin Roosevelt more for having been a guy in a wheelchair, even though nobody knew when he was President that he was a guy in a wheelchair.
RLH: Well, there was a "gentleman's agreement" there...
BS: Yeah, never to mention it. Because, you know, it might make him look bad, like the country's being run by a cripple. Okay, the country's being run by a cripple...who's a political genius! The guy was a brilliant leader. He was a world-class...he may have saved civilization. And you compare Roosevelt to another figure who was one of his main rivals at the time, say Huey Long. The guy had maybe a 25% willingness to sort of give people favors, but 75% demagogic evil. If that guy had taken over the United States, we would've had a fascist dictatorship along the Mussolini line. I mean, he was an American Mussolini figure, and Roosevelt probably saved us from that fate. I don't care that Roosevelt more or less died in his mistress's arms at Hot Springs, that he and his wife didn't get along, that he had polio, or even worse, people now want to deny that he ever smoked. When you see Franklin Roosevelt, he always had his trademark cigarette holder at a jaunty angle in his teeth. You'd no more see him without that than you'd see George Burns without a cigar. But now, people want to tidy up the guy's image....
RLH: Revisionist history.
BS: Yeah, it's contemptible when people do that kind of damage. My respect for Roosevelt goes up, my respect for Churchill goes up because he was a manic-depressive with, you know, father issues. It's great that human beings can accomplish that sort of stuff, and we shouldn't have to wash 'em and soak 'em down and, you know, make them blind metal stuck on a pedestal as a bronze statue in order to respect our political leaders. So I think we're going to move away from that, but I think there'll still be a role for government.
RLH: Speaking of government, and speaking of the networks, you've written some on privacy. What do you think; is it starting to hit its stride or is it dying?
BS: Well, it's hard to say. I mean, point of view is worth eighty I.Q. points in a struggle like that, and I'm very conflicted by it because I don't really want AOL-Time-Warner to be sitting there and finding out every stuffed toy that my six-year-old buys. My children, I think, need to be protected. Their little vulnerable glands shouldn't have some guy scheming who knows every nickel and quarter that a six-year-old has ever spent, and is bending his full adult ingenuity to try and grab things out of little kids' pockets. There's something just mechanically brutal and unfair about that kind of thing. On the other hand, I'm also a journalist, and I know that when people talk about privacy, it's usually because...when an authority figure talks about privacy or "decency", or "How dare you ask that question, sir?", he's usually trying to hide something under the altar cloth. It's not privacy that concerns this guy, it's just that he doesn't want his dirty laundry to get out. And as a journalist, it's very useful to be able to look up something or someone and find out this huge amount of stuff about them that they may or may not know is on the net. So there are benefits to it, and there are downsides to it, and it just remains to be seen how it's going to shake out.
RLH: As far as stuff on the net, that actually leads into what I have down here next. What I'm seeing on the nets more and more is what I call an information glut; there's just so much information and there doesn't seem to be a good way to get at a lot of it. Do you foresee any big breakthroughs coming through in how we get at that?
BS: Well, I like Google.com. [laughter] I mean, search engine technology is what's going to winnow out the chaff from the wheat there. There are a lot of guys who earn a living by doing that. It's a full employment program, the information glut. If there's an information glut, that means that you can offer value-added to combing information, and it makes editors very wealthy. Editors and researchers; that's why Yahoo.com is worth a lot of money. You get onto Yahoo and they've broken up the Internet for you, tried to make some sense out of it. That's why Northern Light makes money. So, you know, if you look at it from the point of view of a whole employment phase, rather than "Gosh, there's just so much," then it looks great, because hey, you know, you can do it. It's the role of scholars, to take a lot of data, which is always there historically, and say, "Okay, this data is looked at as valid, and this stuff here is obviously just propaganda, I'm going to winnow out the lies from authoritative testimony, I'm going to cite stuff, and give my primary sources, I'm going to look at the letter...." This is a very valuable, human means of making meaning out of a glut, although it seems a lot more of a glut now, because you've got broadband access to the Internet. It's like you're trying to drink out of a fire hose. If you've ever been in a really big library, like the Library of Congress, and you just look at say, all the books about Victorian table rappers or spiritualism - you know, basically a dead field - there's literally thousands of them, more than any human being would ever master. No human brain will ever know the full story about even such a minor, fad-like thing.
RLH: So the Renaissance Man is dead.
BS: People talk about Renaissance Men as if they were really amazing guys, but if you brought Leonardo da Vinci in here and started quizzing him on stuff, there was a hell of a lot he didn't know. Like, why does the rain fall? He didn't know that rain evaporates, and then goes up into the clouds and falls down. A fifth grader knows that now. Yeah, maybe he'd mastered many schools of thought, but that's because there wasn't a whole lot of thinking going on there; it just wasn't that much around. So to be a big frog in a small knowledge pond doesn't really make you any better than a tadpole in some enormous ocean.
RLH: What I was looking at as far as search engines and the information thing is that, they fall further behind every day. That's the problem I'm hoping someone will find a solution to.
BS: You can say the same about our own situation, let's say science fiction publishing. Science fiction in 1935, you could read all the SF novels because hey, none of them ever got published. It was a miracle if Arkham House actually made a book. It was all in pulps; there were a lot of pulps, but you could stay on top of the thing. Is that a better situation than a year when three science fiction novels come out every day, with over a thousand published in a year? It means we've got a lot more colleagues, a lot more people with good ideas - ideas, anyhow, publishable ideas - who are able to get a foothold in there.
RLH: I'm just concerned about the people who are looking for these and can't find 'em. That's the situation I find myself in; that's why I love conventions.
BS: Well, you're never going to find everything. I mean, I have that same feeling. I wondered, when I was a beginning writer, my first novel came out and it was a paperback original, I thought, well, I was very proud to have it out there, it's like "At last! I'm out before the public! At last I'm even out before connoisseurs, cognoscenti, people who I respect! Maybe they'll see it and recognize how hard I'm trying!" And now that I actually am a connoisseur and a cognoscenti, for whatever the hell that's worth, I go and I look at first novels, and I think, "Man, I wish I could read all of these and give some really good kid a break," because I know how much that means. I'd love to be able to read some kid's first novel, see that he was really trying, and just write him an encouraging note. You know, "Dear Small-Timer, I have read your first novel and although I see some flaws there, you've really got it going on. Good luck, kid." You know, "Keep at it, keep up with the lousy day job," because I know how much that would mean to someone, because I've been in that situation myself. But then I look at the torrent of them, and I think of all the people I know who are Esteemed Colleagues of mine, whose work I haven't read, that I know is good, and that I may not get to, and it's just very difficult. It's hard.
RLH: I'll confess, I researched up on you through the past week. I was reading the speech you gave at a computer gaming convention, where you were talking about the advantages of books over a transient medium like a computer game.
BS: Absolutely.
RLH: Have you ever considered doing any hypermedia writing, or anything like that?
BS: I'm consulting on a computer game right now, for a company who must remain unnamed. I enjoy hanging with gaming people, I love computer graphics people. I wouldn't have spoken to that audience if I thought I was dismissing their stuff. Not only that, one of my best friends, Warren Spector, runs Looking Glass Games, a guy who does a lot of very well-respected work in the field; he's a dear friend of mine. But I don't really fool myself that I ought to move into that realm, because the guys who I talk to, or gamers, don't think the way I do.
RLH: I'm not talking so much about games as far as - well, use the Web as a crude example.
BS: Oh, I'm all over the Web. Hypertext stories, though, never went anywhere; there's no such thing as a hypertext story. The thing about a story that makes it a story is that it has a beginning, a middle, a dramatic rise, a crescendo, an end, a denoument, and some sense of catharsis in the reader. If I'm telling you the little story of Red Riding Hood and I say "Okay, now we come to the part where the woodsman is going to show up, and if you give me a quarter, I'll tell you that the woodsman kills the wolf, and if you give me fifty cents, I'll tell you the wolf ate Riding Hood and then ate the woodsman," the power of the story is gone immediately, and it doesn't require any kind of high-tech hyperlinking or hot spots. I think of that as a dead form of literature; it does not convey what literature does. If you do it properly, it does become a game; it is no longer a story or a novel.
RLH: Okay, I've got a couple of questions here from some of the fellows at the magazine. How do you think Internet or online publishing will affect print, or do you?
BS: Well, I've gotta tell you, from a mechanical point of view, I think the print engine, the industry, "The Old Baloney Factory," as Damon Knight likes to call it, is as screwed up now as I have ever seen an industry get. The distribution system has collapsed, the publishing houses have eaten one another in just an orgy of acquisitions, spinoffs, and disposition, everybody is in everybody else's pocket, the online systems want to be publishers, the publishers want to be distributors, the distributors want to be online bookstores, the bookstore chains want to be online marketers, they're probably going to want to become publishers, it's just turmoil. It's turmoil from a mechanical point of view. And the reason there is not that there's anything wrong with literature, or that authors can no longer connect with their audience. The problem there is that the means of production and distribution are being digitally revolutionized. There's just no way around the chaos which exists. The thing has got a buzz saw to its head and 50,000 volts through its spine; it's just jerking like a beheaded chicken. And we're just going to have to wait and see what shakes out and if anything like stability ever returns. I think we might be in a position now where there's chaos in publishing for a century, where it never makes any sense, where sometimes authors are editors, sometimes editors are publishers, sometimes publishers are distributors, sometimes.....
RLH: Sometimes editors are interviewers.
BS: I'll tell you, I do more and more serious work outside the intellectual property structure. It's just stuff that I just give away, straight out. It's like, if you want to copy this and give this to a friend, be my guest.
RLH: I noticed that on the speech transcripts.
BS: Well, yeah, they're there for a reason, and it's not that I'm making money off of those directly. But I'll tell you how I do make money off of them: people read them and say, "That's a great speech; I want him to come speak to us." You know, a week doesn't go by when I don't get demands for speeches.
RLH: So "the first one's free."
BS: Well, I intend to make all of 'em free; I mean, I've given away every speech I've ever made that I thought was a major public address of any kind. I mean, there are some that are just so trifling that I would not bother to catalog them or anything, but I think they do me a lot more good as a creative artist just being there for people to stumble over than they would if I put 'em between hard covers and sold it for thirty bucks.
RLH: Another one from the "budding writer" on the magazine: Do you have any advice or resources for people who are trying to break into publishing?
BS: Yeah, absolutely. It depends on what kind of publishing you're getting into. In the world of science fiction, it's actually quite easy to get published. It's not that big a deal. I mean, to get a book published is a big deal, but to get stories accepted.... I mean, I read once somewhere that out of two hundred people who send stuff in, into the slush pile, like one out of two hundred guys actually gets stuff printed. But believe me - have you ever seen a slush pile? If you can't do better than two hundred guys who think they can write, you should just stop right now, because if you saw these guys who send in slush...God, non compos mentis, okay? Not only are they bad writers, they're like insane people, you know? They put stuff in crayon! So if you're persistent and you try, and keep going at it, you can actually get stuff published in SF; it's one of the easiest genres to break into. But to like, earn a living doing it is quite difficult. To actually quit your day job and be a full-time SF writer, nothing else, a very small percentage of people in science fiction ever do that. Furthermore, to do it and be any good at it, that is really a Holy Grail. At this moment, I don't think there are more than ten or twelve people working in our field who will be seriously regarded twenty-five years from now, and it's always been like that. There've always been a few guys who are just way up at the top, like Heinlein. When you compare Heinlein to the kind of guys who were writing for Astounding Stories in 1942, he's not just head-and-shoulders above the average guy who could get published there, he's head, shoulders, hips, knees and ankles above the people. So, you know, there's different kinds of advice. I mean, there's the mechanical kind of advice, like how do you get stuff looked at by an editor? Well, you have to send it in in proper manuscript form. What's proper manuscript form? Well, I'm not gonna tell you; find that out, okay?
RLH: Do your research.
BS: Yeah, exactly. You have to send in paper that looks like it came from a professional, or at least somebody who's made some small effort to figure out what's going on. And then there's the more serious advice, which is like, how do I actually learn to think like a writer thinks? How do I learn to find my own voice in the world of literature? That's a tougher matter, and one that...it's hard to do. I think I do have some very useful advice there; if you've never published anything, you don't know much about it, and you wonder if you've got the stuff. You need to start keeping a journal, and you need to write in it as often as you can, and I advise not even doing it on a computer; do it with your hands. It needs to be really immediate, very tactile, and you need to write down the sort of fragmentary ideas for stories, the fragmentary plots, all the stuff that just sort of crowds in your head, people you talk to, something you heard that might fit into a story, because when you're a writer, you can't hold it all just in your head, you really need to get it down on the paper and sort of discipline it. And I'm not worried about it being proper, not punctuated properly, not spelled properly, not even making any sense - dreams, just the inchoate things. And if that bores you, you're not a writer. If you can't do that for a year, you should quit. If you don't have it together to stay alone in a room hour after hour, staring at blank screens until little drops of blood appear on your forehead - because it's hard, it's hard, and it's really hard to be good. So if you don't like the sound of your own voice so intensely that you can't write regularly just for yourself as an audience, you're not going to please other people. There are a lot of people who want to be writers, and really the world and they would be a lot happier if they became plumbers. Or better yet, computer programmers! You might make millions! You know? You might make millions! And then a lot of people get into writing and they think, "Well, I don't have to work very hard, and maybe there's a chance I'll become a multimillionaire." Forget about it! Go into the Internet; there's a damned good chance you'll become a multimillionaire there, absolutely! You can get rich! Whereas writers, sometimes they get rich, but they very rarely keep it, and they usually are paying some terrible price for the level of emotion and obsession that it takes to keep doing this over and over.
RLH: Well, you know I've got to ask about you, then. You've been writing since what, '77?
BS: Yeah, that's right.
RLH: What keeps you in it?
BS: Well, there are a lot of different things. I mean, I do journalism, I do nonfiction, I do this speaking stuff, I run mailing lists. You know, actually I don't write all that much. I mean, there are a lot of writers who are a hell of a lot more industrious than me. They're going to, like, sit down and write 2000 words a day, and I've never been the kind of guy who did that. Frankly, what I spend most of my time doing is researching stuff. I'm cruising the Internet, I'm reading one of the fifty magazines I subscribe to, I'm reading books, I'm reading old books, weird books, but I've been doing that since I was a little kid. Every once in a while, I'll get this cluster of ideas that seems to me to really...you know, that's really cooking. Sometimes it's a story, and sometimes it's a novel that does it, and then later I'm actually going to become better at it. I'm a lot more productive and verbose than I used to be.
RLH: Well, that leads to the next thing I've got here. What kind of resources do you use for science facts - your ideas, fact checking...?
BS: Oh man, I've got to tell you, I have tremendously good resources. They mostly come from working through high-tech, being an Internet civil liberties activist - you know, I was hanging with the EFF people in the early days of the Web. I have a journalism major; it's what I was trained to do, I have a degree in it. My research habits have always been pretty good, but nowadays I really have pretty well got 'em down. I mean, I'm not like a major-league library science guy, but I can find out where the bodies are buried in pretty short order. And not only that, but I have clusters of people who are similarly interested.
[Pause to flip the tape over.]
RLH: Okay, where were we there?
BS: Well, you were talking about sources for stuff, and I have a lot of colleagues in journalism who'll pass me stuff now. I have groups that I belong to on tangential lists, like EFF or Net Time or The Syndicate in Eastern Europe and, uh, Global Business Network. I think that my biggest ace up my sleeve as an SF writer, these guys are corporate futurists. I see all the corporate futurists now, but I think GBN really has the best people around in corporate futurism. These guys - I mean some of 'em are, you know, rather narrow in their scope because they're businessmen, but there are people in GBN who I consider to be genuine, no-kidding, dyed-in-the-wool, solid gold visionaries. You hang with these guys, you read their stuff - better yet, reading the stuff that they're reading - you could really become very, very well-informed, and every year they do scenarios about the near-term future and what they think are going down, and these things are uncanny. So it's just amazing how well they sort of prophesy, almost, what's happening. If I'd been a member of that group - I mean, it's not like they're the Masons or anything - I do work for them, I hang out with them, I consider them colleagues, I guess, and they're just great; it's just a great gold mine. I no longer worry about finding stuff to write science fiction about; I have enough material to write - I could write a science fiction novel a day, if I could just type that fast. Material is not the problem for me any more; the problem for me is "what does it mean?" and "how does it feel?", trying to make some sense of the data.
RLH: One thing that struck me - again, reading Holy Fire - chapter one, you're coming out with all these gadgets and social innovations, and all the ways things have changed. Do you think that up before you start working on a plot, or do you forecast your future to serve the story you want to tell, or...how do you handle that?
BS: Well, there are different ways to do it, but the technique that sort of comes most naturally to me is "ideas, character." I mean, I have an idea, a cluster of ideas that I'm trying to work out and trying to extrapolate. It's like, "what's the implication if this happened?", "if this, then what?", "if that, then what?", "if that, then what?", and I want to carry it - the real cyberpunk slogan is "carrying extrapolation into the fabric of daily life." I want to know what's on the kitchen stove in that society, what does that society have in its freezer? What do its gutters look like, what do the cars look like, what do the guttermen look like? Then I want to pick somebody whose crisis is dramatic and has a story arc to it, but that will be very illuminating of that society's particular...zeitgeist, you know, the spirit of its time. So, in picking a 93-year-old woman for a book about longevity treatments, it's just damned obvious! I mean, you could write it from the point of view of a 20-year-old who's been dominated by the very elderly, which I think is a very likely situation; how could that not happen?
RLH: And to some extent, you had that in there.
BS: Possibly, but then what I have is a character who does both, right? She starts out as a gerontocrat, a person who's very old, quite well-to-do, and dismissive of younger people, then she goes through this treatment and passes herself off as a younger person. So she's actually bivalent, she recognizes...well, with her flesh she impersonates and incarnates the struggle in her own society. She's somebody who's on both sides of the fence. Instead of "seeing clouds from both sides now," she just brings across a level of insight into the predicament of her society that no other character in that book could bring. Even though the people around her are more important than she is, they're better informed than she is, they're more ambitious than she is, you know, she spends a lot of the book as basically somebody who's mentally ill. Nevertheless, she illuminates everything around her, and I think that's what makes her a solid character.
RLH: On a personal note, I have to say I loved the way you changed voice right after the procedure went through, and it really hit home that, "hey, this is a different person now, the rules have changed." I really liked that, as a reader and something of a writer.
BS: Well, I was very happy when John Kessel told me that he had been reading Holy Fire and the thing that he had liked about it was the interview with the doctor before she goes into the treatment. He says, "why hasn't anyone given us this scene before?" And I thought that was good, I felt very pleased with that, I thought, "okay, I hit the right note there." And I also respect John's critical acumen very highly, but I was just really happy with the way it was working. I think I pretty well got my chops down there, in the way the thing is just handled, from the camera angles in it, I think, are just very effective.
RLH: You mentioned Bob Heinlein before; and one of his quotes - I wish I could remember it right now - comes back to this, that given the development of the car, anyone could have foreseen certain aspects, but it would have taken a genius to forecast the change in sexuality due to the drive-in movie. Who are your other influences, that you really count?
BS: Well, I don't know if Heinlein was that great an influence on me. I admire him very much, and I consider him to be one of the most talented and determined writers that the field ever had, but I don't sit around thumbing through old Heinlein novels the way I would thumb through, say, an old J.G. Ballard novel. I think this guy is the greatest artist our genre ever produced, and you read things like his "Death of a Space Age" books, stories where he's talking about abandoned gantries at Cape Canaveral in, like, 1965! You look at these, and it's like, at the time people were just shocked by this. It's like, "Of course the future of man is in space! How dare you imply that someday they'll be overrun with vines and abandoned!" He just had a level of insight that was light-years beyond these guys who were swallowing John Campbell's gospel wholesale, and he's never gotten the credit for that. There are no J.G. Ballard Nebulas, there are no J.G. Ballard Hugos, that guy is just, he's a titan of our genre.
RLH: Perhaps "influence" wasn't the right word..."inspirations," perhaps?
BS: Well, I'm a big fan of the British New Wave, because I spent a lot of time in India in my formative years, three years I was in India. I used to read a lot of British SF, because that's what was in the Indian libraries.
RLH: Of course.
BS: And I was living in the sort of "Golden Ghetto" there, I was kind of a [???] oil company kid, and I had a lot of time to read, and I would read New Worlds anthologies and Moorcock and Vincent King and Brian Aldiss, and this is sort of what was around, and it really had a profound effect on me. I mean, it had almost as profound an effect as living in a foreign country, which I think really changed my whole attitude toward life, the universe, and everything in a way that I've never recovered from. So in a way, I really am sort of a disciple of the British New Wave. And of course, Harlan Ellison is the guy who literally took me under his wing, published my first novel, sent me to Clarion, told other people publicly that I had talent and they ought to pay attention to me...I was really an acolyte of his. He did more than any other single human being to get me where I am now, absolutely.
RLH: Do you listen to, or can you recommend, any good cyberpunk music?
BS: Well, there are a lot of guys who do that stuff. One of the guys I know who's most into cyber-rock as a genre, who's really into SF and its musical implications, is DJ Spooky, Paul B. Miller. But he's like a techno, sort of experimental guy. And if you put on a DJ Spooky tape, I don't think you'd say, "Oh yeah, that reminds me of a William Gibson novel!" It's just not there, I mean, the guy's completely in his own head space. Listening to a DJ Spooky thing is like listening to - I don't know, John Coltrane or something and thinking that that's cyberpunk; it's just not the case. I mean, there are cyberpunks who are musicians, like John Shirley's got his own band, he's had several bands - the Panther Moderns, and so forth. And they've got CDs and tapes out, and you can go listen to John Shirley sing, and it's like, "hey, this is John Shirley singing, sounds kind of like Iggy Pop, and a little bit like Lou Reed, it's got really clever, sort of obviously science fictional lyrics." I come from a big music town, Austin, and Lew Shiner used to be in bands, and he's written books about rock and roll, and he's got a rock and roll novel out right now. It's about a woman living in Austin trying to be in a rock and roll band, that's a Lew Shiner novel, and he's a cool cyberpunk guy.
RLH: DJ Spooky, is that spelled like the adjective "spooky"?
BS: Yeah, S-P-O-O-K-Y. I mail him; I get email from him all the time, he's like a friend of mine; he interviewed me once. But, can I just say, "Oh yeah, if you loved Holy Fire, you'll love DJ Spooky's latest CD," you know, you probably won't, quite frankly. The people who love DJ Spooky are not going to love my books, either.
RLH: What's your take on people who call themselves cyberpunks, hackerz-with-a-Z, and all those types?
BS: I don't have any problem with it. It's like having Allen Ginsberg being worried about guys who call themselves beatnik. There were a lot of guys who were beat and had a beat attitude and stuff, but I think there are certain themes in cyberpunk that have really sort of broken out from between the covers and have become genuinely popular things. Number one among them is the posthuman. I really think that the, it used to be that it was really hard to talk about someone who was no longer human, in terms that weren't defined by Mary Shelley. In other words, if you were no longer human, you were basically something which was sewn together, a monster. But now you have characters like the Star Trek Borg, who are no longer human, but very seductive in a way. A character can become of them, and leave them. You've got groups like the Extropians, who have clearly metabolized this kind of science fiction ethos to a really pretty shocking extent, and who are absolutely quite serious about breaking the limits of the human condition, and carrying it absolutely as far as they can get away with without being burned at the stake. I think that really has opened a Pandora's Box for our society, and that it is being metabolized, that you can now have people who are computer programmers who may never read SF, but are familiar with posthuman tropes, or one day maybe I can get an immortality treatment. Maybe I can increase my own intelligence, or maybe I'll live long enough to do things which are physically impossible now, which are going to make me into something radically different from any human being until now. It's troublesome, because that really is an epistomological tar baby. It has fascist overtones, the Nietzschean superman, kind of the "SS uberpeople" - I think that's a demon that we have helped unleash in the world, but we've also sort of pointed out that it was there. And I think cyberpunk writing has just shone a Klieg light on that kind of unspeakable thing that we're doing.
RLH: What makes someone "posthuman"?
BS: Well, my feeling is that it ought to be best sort of defined on, like, biological terms. What would a "postrat" be? It probably wouldn't interbreed with other rats, first of all. It would have physical capacities that were very clearly un-ratlike. Like you say, a rat that can fly - well, okay that's no longer a rat. Well, it looks like a rat, it eats cheese, it has a naked tail - but it's flying!
RLH: So once it evolves....
BS: Well, if it's so radically divorced physically and mentally from the state of all other rats that it just is clearly not of them, then it's a post-rodent. My feeling is, as I point out in Holy Fire, that it is going to happen to animals first. Long before there are any posthumans, there are going to be shitloads of post-labrats.
RLH: And yet, we're at a convention of "pink monkeys."
BS: Well, it's like sans or slans; this is something people have been talking about in fandom for a long time. I don't know if you know that term, it's from an old First Fandom term from a van Vogt novel. He wrote this novel Slan, in which the world is populated by normal human beings and telepathic mutants who have sort of brain tendrils in their hair, and they have this sort of secret cult of slans who are trying to work their way into the core of society and not be found out. And as soon as fans read this van Vogt novel, they immediately sort of identified with these people, it's like "Yes, we're freaks! We're freaks and geeks!" The thing about fandom is, they've never actually had, like, a transmogrifier machine where they could in fact walk in as kind of pear-shaped, myopic, technically educated people and come out the far side as eight-foot tall purple people with rhinoceros hides...and the technical capacity to do that is not that far away.
RLH: Last question, and - well, at least the last one I've got down here. I really like the stuff you've been doing with the Dead Media Project. This may sound pretentious as all hell, but has the Dead Media Project given you any insight into the fundamentals of how people deal with ideas and communication?
BS: Yes, it has. But, after I did the thing - Candy and I worked on Dead Media Project for four years, and right now, we're not working on it. The project's still around, but I've handed it over to one of our best guys on the list, Tom James. He really is a guy who's very up to speed on dead technology. I wanted to write a book about dead media in which I would answer the very serious questions that I had about technological development, but then I had a crisis of conscience about it, because I really felt that singling out media was not working, that if you actually looked at what goes on in media, the thing that causes them to die or causes them to succeed is not because they're media. It's generally because of the other thing that they are. Like, television is a medium, but it's also a glass tube with an electron gun in it. And you've got a society that can manage electron guns and can mass-manufacture glass tubes cheaply, and in that society, television flourishes. But it's not because it's television, it's because it's a glass tube with an electron gun. And the Pony Express flourishes because it's a guy on a pony. As soon as you have a railroad, and an iron horse, there's no need for a guy on a pony. But it wasn't the letters or the messages, or the content of the media, that caused that medium, the Pony Express, to go. What happened was that there was a change between horses and railroads that was just not physically possible. The death of the Pony Express is about railroads, it's not about media. Then I thought, "Well, you know, I really need a broader-scale view in order to do this; this is just too parochial, it's too narrow. I really need to have a sort of Grand Theory of Technology before I can have a Grand Theory of Media." So I've been hanging out with industrial design people. That's what I do mostly now. I have a design list called the Viridian List, which is about four times the size of Dead Media, because a lot more people are interested in industrial design than are interested in dead gizmos and communication. I may come to no conclusion with this, just as I more or less did with Dead Media, but I certainly learned an awful lot about dead media, and I'm now the world's foremost expert on extinct forms of communication technology. Really. I looked. There's no one on Earth that can match me in the breadth of my understanding of all these different things.
RLH: So, I've got to ask: does Stonehenge qualify?
BS: No. No, because it doesn't actually pass a medium; Stonehenge is an astronomical instrument, like an astrolabe or a sort of giant observatory that the Islamic guys built. No, it doesn't qualify, because it doesn't carry a message. It's like musical instruments don't qualify, like a sackbut, it's a dead musical instrument. Okay, you can maybe play things on a sackbut, you can play a tune on a sackbut and everybody says, "Oh, that's that tune about Burgundy by Homeland that always makes people happy" - so we just decided that that's not media, it's music. But Stonehenge is not a medium, it's astronomy. It's also a ritual site, so it's astronomy and it's architecture, but it's not a medium by our definition.
RLH: Well, I've really enjoyed it.
BS: It's kind of you to take an interest.