reason: One thing I notice about the progression of your novels is that the first ones were significantly different in time and space from where we are, and increasingly we bring things closer to the present day. Does that represent the same kind of shift in attention to the world that we see in your nonfiction writing?
Sterling: It's hard to say what is opportunism and what is very typical science fiction writer development. If you read Jules Verne, one of his first books is Paris in the Twentieth Century, which is far away in time and space and could not get published. Then there is Five Weeks in a Balloon, which is in Africa. Then he becomes a member of the Amiens City Council, and at that point all the technocratic brio and the incredible voyage leaks out of his work, and he starts writing these really quite dark political novels like Robur the Conqueror and Master of the World. Because the guy has actually come to an understanding of where the bodies are buried in the power structure. That's kind of overwhelming, and a departure from his earlier fantasies of technocratic prowess: I am Nemo; I will assemble a superelectric submarine.
It's similar to the mental progression of mathematicians. In their early 20s, they're whipping the four-color theorem, and then by the time they're 90, they're working on some tiny, obscure little movement ahead. It's really interesting to someone who's really interested in mathematics.
reason: Novelists don't quite follow that path.
Sterling: Novelists don't. But science fiction novelists do. Real novelists die in the arms of their fourth wife of cirrhosis of the liver at age 57, but science fiction writers are getting bestsellers by chewing over the supertrilogy of the trilogy's trilogy at age 82.
reason: Do you ever have a feeling of vertigo when you look around and see lot of things that seem science fictional that we didn't anticipate, or that we did anti-cipate but didn't expect would come true so soon?
Sterling: Or that they would be so banal. I have moments of future shock. I'm not invulnerable to that. What interests me is where ideas that are very novel to me become old-fashioned and even antiquated. But it doesn't quite shock me in the way that it once did. I didn't merely read the prognostications of my own epoch; 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.
reason: It's strange that not only are your idle musings on Usenet from 15 years ago still out there, but someone could actually confront you with them.
Sterling: That doesn't surprise me too much. I put it in this new book. There are certain things that, in middle age, become obvious to you. 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. What did Thomas Edison really spend a lot of time on? Trying to get rubber out of milkweeds. He devoted fantastic effort to this mad scheme.
There are offhand comments one makes, or little things that you do, that become catch phrases or stuff that people will stick as signature lines on the Internet. It's rarely the polished aphorism that you're sweating over.
reason: It's like what Derrida tells us: You produced this text, and then it's totally out of your control.
Sterling: I agree with that, and the reason I don't resent it is I have taken such liberties with other people's texts. I don't want to submit to any text control system that would conceivably protect my interests from others, when my interests are so freewheeling.
reason: Are we on the verge of post-humanity?
Sterling: I think we are on the verge of post-humanity, but I don't think it's going to look like what any Extropian thinks it's going to look like. At the end of my novel Holy Fire [Bantam, 1997], two post-humans meet. The woman is assessing her former husband and says he's a god. But he's not a god. He's a tommyknocker or a garden gnome. He's this thing which is no longer human and doesn't have human concerns.
There are methods of speculating about how this will play out, and some will have some traction, and some will be ideological or otherwise mistaken. The Extropian problem is thinking you can upload yourself into a computer and have this rapture of the nerds. It was a powerful fantasy of escaping the unbearable pressures of being human. And there are many unbearable pressures of being human. But you find that when you escape one of these things you generally bring all your baggage with you. We will escape some of the limits, but we will not escape into some pure electro-Platonic world any more than the Internet will turn out to be this pure electro-Platonic philosophers' realm.
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