(2020-09-18) The Difference Engine Interview With Bruce Sterling

The Difference Engine: Interview with Bruce Sterling. I guess I’ll start by asking where the term ‘slipstream’ came from. BS: It was invented by my friend the late Richard Dorsett while the two of us were discussing a category of non-genre fantasy books that we had no name for. “They’re certainly not ‘mainstream,'” I said, and “Why not ‘slipstream?'” he suggested, and I thought it was a pretty good coinage.

BS: Well, I still collaborate rather a lot. Following William Gibson on Twitter is quite useful, I can see what he’s up to when we’re time zones apart, and we don’t have to meet any deadlines.

There are times in Turin when I feel like I’m “collaborating” with the entire nation of Italy. I ask myself: “What’s the Italian way of responding to this?” Eventually I had to create the “Bruno Argento” alter ego; my pseudonym is an American who writes science fiction about Italy, but he pretends to be an Italian who writes fantascienza in English. But I’m not Tolkien inventing Middle Earth in those stories; instead, I’m in collaboration with Turin, and with Italy.

It always concerned me that, as a writer, I might fall into a rut and be forced to repeat my earlier successes, reduced to “collaborating” with my younger self. I might be wrong about this, but I don’t believe that I do that

through these phoenix-like gestures, I seem to get closer to my true self, an “exile on planet Earth,” as Brian Aldiss used to put it.

My latest book — my Bruno Argento short-story collection — is titled “Robot Artists and Black Swans,” and it indeed seems to have rather a lot of robot artists that turn out to be black swans — just, boundary-breaking, culture-crossing, animated, liminal, kinetic things that are beyond prediction and also beautiful.

I’m rather busy in the milieu of artists who make art with various technologies and devices that weren’t created for art practice. I’m not such an artist myself, but I am an author and journalist, so sometimes I can describe what they’re doing in some relatively lucid way

The twenty-first century is one-fifth over now, and it’s been quite a tough historical period, with terrorism, depression, austerity, repression, ever-mounting climate pollution disasters, and a serious new disease, too. Not much joy or brio in this century so far. It’s got quite an Eastern European feeling, like daily life in the Warsaw Pact. I have the intuition that I don’t yet have much to say about life in these new circumstances. So, I ought to devote time to research.

“manifestos” are a useful practice. To declare your issues in a bold, simple, confrontational way, making your creative difficulties “manifest” in public, I approve of that. Manifestos should be like scientific hypotheses. It’s fine if they prove to be wrong (claim), as long as there’s a general advancement in understanding

BS: “Viridian Design” was the project that succeeded “Dead Media.” It was an activist project, because it was about averting the Greenhouse Effect, but it didn’t work. That was an effort well worth trying, because the stakes were very high and the hour was already late, but we live at the mercy of climate change now. Life is no longer about averting a climate disaster, it’s about “resilience” during an ongoing disaster that is rapidly getting much worse.

Sometimes it’s important to make moral gestures, regardless of success or failure. I feared that we would end badly, and we have ended badly and it’s getting worse yet, but I worked on “Viridian” for ten years. Mostly it was just ideas, speculations and conjectures, but being who I am, that was what I had to offer. After “Viridian” I stopped doing experimental Internet projects and I started teaching in design schools.

Your question is really about finding a science fiction author who is little-known now and might be big someday, so I would say that the Indian author Samit Basu might could do with some general attention. He might end up working for Indian television and cinema instead of writing more sci-fi novels, because that would likely make more sense in his cultural circumstances, but he’s one of the smartest science fiction people that I’ve ever met.

The novelist and lawyer Christopher Brown, who wrote the science fiction works “Failed State” and “Rule of Capture,” is also a writer of impressively keen intelligence.

Finally, in times of severe culture-clash like nowadays, you should make a point of reading writers whose opinions you hate. That’s not good for you as an artist; as an artist it feels bad for you, but it is a survival tactic and it’s the fastest way to learn things that you didn’t know.