Sterling, Bruce
I’ve got Google up all the time. It gives you this veneer of command of the facts which you do not, in point of fact, have. It’s extremely useful for novelists but somewhat dangerous if you’re pretending to be a brain surgeon. (…)
I’ve been very interested in futuristic prognostications written in the 19th century. They’re always off. No one can ever make it as banal as it is. If you’re writing about the future, it’s hard to write about things that will be omnipresent and boring and explain to your readers that they are novelties to you but boring to your characters. (…)
The best way to have a really great idea is to have a thousand ideas. The guy who has the thousand ideas will be valorized for idea 837 and for idea 732, but those were never the ones he treasured. (…)
Social movements hate heretics far more than they hate pagans. Pagans who have never heard the gospel – you should clothe them. You should send out missionaries. They just don’t know. It’s the people who do know, who have the opposite idea, whom you hate.
— From: Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling On Media, Design, Fiction, And The Future, Interviewed by Mike Godwin, January 2004.
