Bruce Sterling is in peace with himself. He doesn't care anymore if people call his work Futurism, Design Criticism, Art or Literature or Science Fiction, Fantastic Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Literary Writing, Underground Writing, Cyberpunk, 80's Wave or New Wave, ... "As long as I know what I am doing, I am fine" he says, sweating profusely in a cafe in Vienna. 36° Celsius in June is anything but usual for this part of Europe. Times change and so does the life of 'Chairman Bruce', "the spokesperson for the cyberpunk literary flare", as Jon Lebkowsky from bOING bOING put it more than 10 years ago.

Together with William Gibson he is counted as the leading figure in Cyberpunk, a term that is generally credited to Bruce Bethke's story 'Cyberpunk', first published in 1983. The word 'cyber' refers to cybernetics, the study of information and control in man and machine, as Norbert Wiener defined it in 1948. The second concept 'punk' is commonly used since 1976, as a do-it-yourself style of music, characterised by independent and anarchist attitudes.

Nothing remains novel In the 80s the 'Hard Science Fiction' genre in the US reached its all time low. Writers who believed in anti-gravity, psychic power and "wrote about spacecraft orbital dynamics to an accuracy of .9999 tend to be pathetically naive about the hard realities of science and its relation to society", Bruce Sterling once said in an interview. The sub-genre Cyberpunk wanted to be different. Their fiction is driven by the near future and "to stem the impact of technology on society", a description Bruce Sterling, who will turn 50 next year, still pays tribute to. The term 'Cyberpunk', on the other hand, sounds outdated by now. "The clock only moves in one direction", he says in the interview. "Nothing reminds novel for ever. So you know just anything 'cyber', just the word cyber is very dated. It is like saying electro or atomic or streamline."

"Homo sapiens declared extinct" is a title Bruce Sterling used for an article about Posthumanities, a topic Cyberpunks were really into. The article got published in the American Science Magazine 'Nature' in 1999. "For a [Hard] Science Fiction Writer it just doesn't get much 'harder' than that", Bruce comments his debut in 'Nature'. In the meantime Mondo 2000, once the organ for Cyberpunks, was overshadowed by Wired Magazin, which - in 2003 - has also already seen its best years.

"What happened to us [Cyberpunks] basically is that we became respectful. Like, William Gibson writes New York Times Bestsellers and is reviewed in the London Review of Books. I fly in to give talks in Vienna and write magazine columns for Wired Magazin. Gibson got his doctorate in Design. I am really envious about that than I keep expecting somebody to give me a doctor. When I got to be Doctor Sterling, THE Cyberpunk, you know, THAT would be good. If I was from a small European country I'd want to be Minister of Culture, that would be so good. But you know we are old and grey. That is just the nature of business. Nothing remains novel for ever."

AD 2380 "'I can't understand what the fuss is about', Rita 'Cuddles' Srinivasan, actress, sex symbol and computer peripheral", says in Bruce Sterling's 'Nature' article. Today the same can be asked about the Cyberpunk movement, that had its fun in the 80s and early 90s. Bruce Sterling became the advocate of the movement which was brought to the public by William Gibson's book 'Neuromancer '.

Internet at this time meant being hooked up on a message board like Compuserve. Back at this "neolithic cyberspace dawn" - Gibson and Sterling were still using a typewriter - both managed to open up a new space behind the monitor for their readers. It was 1990 when the FBI started their 'Operation Sun Devil', and began to treat the computer underground as criminal. In the book "Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier" (1992) Bruce Sterling wrote about these operations that also took place in Austin, Texas, where he has a residence. The book is literary freeware and one of Bruce Sterling's already more journalistic-driven work. Open Source, Hackers, Netrunners, Deck Cowboys, Megacorps, and the belief "Information wants to be free" once drove this genre.

The future is now. Bruce Sterling nowadays prefers to write articles about: 'Information wants to be worthless'. "This idea is as powerful as the former one", he adds. "It is like Bill Gates still owns Window 3.0 but nobody will buy it ever. Even a perfect working copy. I can take out copies of Gate's Windows 3.0 and leave it on every table in here. Free. With an explanation how to use it and a 5$ bill attached and nobody will use it. And that is the real underside of information economics."

He holds speeches in front of open source geeks, telling them that their real threat is not Microsoft, but comes from groups like "Drink and Die", people who are organized software pirates. "They behave a lot like open culture people, but they are purloin other people's property. They are cracking it, they are breaking copy protection. They don't want to give you Linux or Suse or Red Hat or any of these other praiseworthy things. They want to give you Microsoft's property or the property of other companies. They derive a thrill by doing it and they are not nice guys. They have very aggressive names. They don't call themselves names like 'the universal bill of human rights' or 'Helsinki agreement', they get themselves names like: 'Black Ninja 415' or 'Total Destroyer'. I hang out with these guys and I am weary of their attitudes of self-righteousness merely because they don't happen to take money for their deportations."

Bruce Sterling grew up. He is no longer a 24 year old guy who likes to write under comical pseudonyms as Vincent Omniaveritas, Aubrey LaPuerta or Todd Refinery. He will still write Science Fiction, though. He has a contract to fulfil. Bruce Sterling is interested in writing a novel that can only be written in the 21st century. Some of the material can propably be found in his newest book "Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years", but his interest in 'Counter Culture' is over. "That's something for bored middle age housewives", he says. "It is like I Ching. Nothing more than a kind of weird remnant of the self-realisation movement and New Age stuff: fat dietism." What counts these days can't be called Cyberpunk anymore. The new term to use maybe is Open Source Culture. "Those guys got an agenda. They are going from A to B to C and they accomplish a lot. Open Source people are a lot more aggressive. They have got generally practical solutions to a lot of really pressing problems and that is a rare and viable thing."

spanish version The Bruce Sterling Online Index