Gothic High-tech — Bruce Sterling

THE FUTURE IS A KIND OF HISTORY THAT HASN'T HAPPENED YET

He's the legendary Cyberpunk Guru. He roams our postmodern planet, from the polychrome tinsel of Los Angeles to the chicken-fried cyberculture of Austin... From the heretical Communist slums of gritty Belgrade to the Gothic industrial castles of artsy Torino...always whipping that slider-bar between the unthinkable and the unimaginable.

He's a Californian design visionary. He's an European electronic-art curator. He's a Swiss professor of media philosophy. He's a Prophet of Augmented Reality, even. He's an author, journalist, editor, critic, theorist, futurist, and blogger. Obviously he's pretty much anything that he can get his hands on.

And he never stops typing. This sixth collection of his fantastic stories is a comic arsenal of dark euphoria. It's even weirder, harsher and more twisted than the scary decade that inspired it. Boy, that's saying something.

If there's one thing dear to the heart of this exotic character, one vital prize he will never, ever surrender, one stony core to his mutable, globalized being, it's his fanatical allegiance to the radical potential of science fiction. That is the truth. Really. That is one hundred percent accurate. You could look that up on Wikipedia.

Just like some far-fetched, globe-trotting antihero from one of his own unsettling, yet darkly prophetic novels, he is... Actually, never mind who he is. Does that matter? Is that an issue for us, really? You know what? We're all done here. Turn the page. We need to pretty much move right along.