Plutopians Jon and Scoop converse with Bruce Sterling, renowned for his cyberpunk novels. The discussion delves into Sterling’s interests beyond cyberpunk, including industrial design, steampunk, Frida Kahlo, and space exploration. Sterling shares insights on the evolution of the Viridian Design Movement and its impact on addressing climate change, albeit with limited success. He reflects on his experiences with design criticism and the intriguing intersections between historical fantasy and science fiction in his work. The conversation also touches on the surreal state of the world, AI advancements, and Sterling’s perspective on the resilience and adaptability of humanity through history’s challenges.

Bruce Sterling:

I follow space stuff. I mean I’m very interested in astronomy and space exploration so I’m looking up stuff from NASA or the ESA or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I follow a lot of people who are doing stuff like that. Things like looking for potential asteroid impacts and the amount of space technology that is present there and the sophistication of it is really impressive. I mean there aren’t a lot of manned human bases where things are but there are unbelievable amounts of drone coverage and fantastic amounts of incredibly detailed photos of the surface of Mars, the surface of Venus – like we know what’s on the dark side of the moon. We have samples from the dark side of the moon.

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