Under Heavy Weather:
An Interview with Bruce Sterling
conducted by Dwight Brown, Lawrence Person and Michael Sumbera
Lawrence Person: Bruce Sterling interview, take only.
Bruce Sterling: I pity the guy who has to decipher this crowd noise.
LP: Dwight!
BS: I pity Dwight.
LP: Okay. I understand your new novel is about weather.
BS: Yeah.
LP: What made you decide to write about that?
BS: Well, you know, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the three worst weather disasters of American history, of this century anyway, all took place in the last eighteen months. I mean, just watch the news.
<chips arrive> LP: Oh, goody, food. Food is always good.
BS: Food-like substances. Probably a bad mistake to start eating those hot sauces before you got your ice-free Dr. Pepper in front of you.
LP: Nah, this is wimpy restaurant hot sauce.
BS: Not that I know that many people who are so Puritan as to drink their Dr. Pepper without ice.
LP: I need the kick.
WAITRON: Would you like to go ahead and order?
BS: Yes, please.
Michael Sumbera: Sure. All right.
WAIT: Knock yourselves out.
BS: Could I have the fajita omelet?
WAIT: Beef or chicken?
BS: The beef fajita, the beef, yeah.
MS: The migas and fajitas.
WAIT: Migas and fajitas. Beef or chicken?
MS: Beef.
WAIT: What kind of tortillas do you like?
MS: Flour.
WAIT: Okay. End of the interrogation.
LP: I think I'll have the fajita omelet, with a side order of hash browns. And beef.
WAIT: All the omelets come with hash browns. Do you want extras?
LP: Nah. That should do me.
WAIT: You said beef, is that right?
LP: Beef, yeah.
Dwight Brown: And I'd like the fajita omelet with a side order of toast.
WAIT: Would you like beef as well, or chicken?
DB: Beef, please.
LP: You're a trendsetter, Bruce.
BS: Either that or I'm surrounded by slavish yes-men. People with no minds of their own. So anyway, you've been seeing more and more coverage of the greenhouse effect. The last book I wrote, Islands In the Net, deliberately had no bad weather elements in it. Even though it's set in the 2020s and is a fairly well extrapolated book, there's very little mention of any kind of weather disturbance in it. But since that time, it's been becoming more and more clear that there is, in fact, something going on. It's gonna be a little difficult to say that you've treated the possibilities of the future honestly unless you've come up with some kind of vision of what this might actually look like. Which is why I've written a book which is basically a science fiction disaster novel.
LP: Ala Ballard? Or Wyndham?
BS: Well, no. <chuckles> Yeah, in a way. More like Ballard than Wyndham. No, the things that are cool about those Ballard disaster novels is that they are vehicles of psychic fulfillment. It's like the worse the disaster gets, the more satisfied everyone feels on some terrible level. That's my feeling about a heavy weather catastrophe, that it won't mean the end of the world. I mean, Waco's still there. Waco had a terrible tornado hit it in the 50's, one of the worst ever. Killed a bunch of people, leveled the downtown. Well, you know, people just get back up!
LP: Galveston's still there.
BS: Well, Galveston took a crippling blow, but, yeah, it's still there. And Galveston doesn't even have an excuse to be there. Galveston is the stupidist place in the world to build a big town. They literally built the thing out of nothing. They dredged stuff up and raised the level of the entire town, like 10 feet, and put a big seawall on it. That is a weird idea. Basically, you shouldn't build on a sandbar. You shouldn't build on a flood plain, either, but people just get used to it. I mean, what about Bangladesh? In Bangladesh, they get these massive floods. Monsoons come up with clockwork regularity and wipe out a quarter of a million people at a time. And it's just another quarter of a million, guys. There's no end to 'em.
LP: "We're making more."
BS: You can march 'em into the sea four abreast forever. You literally could. <chuckles> Things just sort of get tougher and nastier, but weather doesn't last. It's just a vision of the future which is a lot bleaker than the one in Islands in the Net-but it's not unrelievedly bleak. Basically, it's just crazy. It's violent, and it's catastrophic, and it's very anarchic, and I don't know, it's just a different book than any I've done before.
LP: So, what do you think needs to be done about the Greenhouse Effect or the ozone layer-whatever eco-catastrophe you think we're facing?
BS: Well, I think it's a good idea that CFC's were phased out, but basically, Lawrence, I think we're fucked.
LP: <laughs>
BS: I think it's too late. We should have done something back in 1963, you know? We should have paid attention when there were people picketing on Earth Day in 1970. We blew it. We had a chance, and it's too late now-whatever's gonna happen, is gonna happen. I think it'd be a good idea to start phasing back our carbon right now. I think there probably ought to be massive carbon dioxide taxes, we oughta to start worrying seriously about shit like methane and so forth. But I don't think the government-any government, anywhere, has the power to actually enforce that. I don't understand how the hell you're gonna get a CO2 tax-and even if you do that, people are just gonna move offshore, they're gonna go do it in Mexico and Brazil and wherever it is that people don't give a fuck about the environment, and a lot of people don't. And we will not be the first civilization destroyed by environmental disaster either. I've spent some time out in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, a while ago, looking at the old Anasazi ruins out in the Southwest. There's a people who basically bootstrapped theirselves up from corn farmers up to the point of a pretty well advanced Neolithic civilization. They had little skyscrapers in there, and pottery and textiles and the whole nine yards. They ran out of water-they fucking died, man. There was no appeal from this. I mean, imagine a couple of Anasazis sitting around over their pottery saying, "Well, what do you think we ought to do about the fact that there's no rain today, Two Dogs?" "Well, Striped Blanket, I think what we ought to do is die." There is no alternative. It's the weather, man. You can't do fuck about the weather.
DB: What's your working title for the book?
BS: Heavy Weather. I'm pretty sure that will be the title, I saw the contract.
DB: You're going to be keynoting the EFF Cryptography conference Wednesday?
BS: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I'd better write that speech, too. I'm only speaking twenty minutes, it's not a major presentation or anything, I'm just gonna introduce the participants who are more than capable of expressing themselves. They don't need me. I mean, Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, Esther Dyson, that ilk-they don't need any handholding from me to get their ideas across.
LP: No shy, shirking violets there.
BS: By no means.
LP: Back briefly to Heavy Weather, and then we'll go on. What'd you think of Bush's idea to auction pollution rights?
BS: Well, I don't think that was his idea.
LP: No, but I think it was put forth in his presidency.
BS: Yeah, well. I'm not sure if Bush ever had an idea. I never knew him to come up with one. He was not an idea man. He was a manager. What do I think of that idea? I think it's too little, too late. And besides, even if you did auction off pollution rights in the U.S., what about the former Soviet Union? You know, you just look at those records-we've been measuring CO2 in the atmosphere, and it goes up in this sort of lethal cycle of-I mean, every summer it goes down, 'cause the trees suck up a bunch of it, and then every winter it goes up again, but it's been rising steadily, with one hitch. Know what the hitch was? Early 1930s. World-wide industrial collapse. That was the only time it even slowed down. Mind you, it didn't dip-it just slowed its growth some. Okay? It didn't actually go down.
LP: Sort of like the budget deficit.
BS: That's right. It's the carbon surplusage. You know, I could be wrong, and other people could be wrong, it may be that we'll double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and it won't make fuck-all of a difference. But I think it already has. I don't think it's any accident that most of the Mississippi Valley was under water this season. I don't think it's any accident that we had the biggest hurricane in recorded history a few years ago, that we had the most damaging hurricane in U.S. history a while ago. No, these aren't some kind of coincidence, some sort of odd far-fetched thing. The climate is messed up. There's only so much that it can take. If it turns out that nothing happens except that everything gets a little warmer and balmier, that's fine by me. But hell no, we're sitting here, in a city that just broke its record for sustained drought. It hasn't rained solidly yet, and thank God we've got some resevoirs and all this crap built, even though that's a problem in itself. I'll tell you one thing: I would rather face this problem than nuclear Armageddon. I actually feel kind of cheerful about facing this problem. I'll probably be dead before it really gets bad. And I'm gonna be living high on the hog: I got a big two ton car and an air conditioner and Freon and hairspray and all that crap. You know, it's our children and grandchildren that are the ones who are really going to catch it.
LP: "Here, Amy. Here's the bill. Enjoy. Bye." <pause> So, what do you think is the solution to the problems in the former Soviet Union? How are they going to get out of situation they're in, if they're going to get out of it?
BS: Well, I don't know what the hell the solution is. I don't know if they've got a solution. It's like asking, "What is the solution to," you know, your daily life. I mean, the solution is that you die eventually. You just keep tackling problems until you die. As long as they can stay away from, an actual Yugoslav genocide scenario , I think they'll mellow out after a while. [Note: This interview was conducted well before the Russian offensive in Chechnya - Ed.] They're not entirely lacking in ingenuity or resilience, and they have a a big country, and they're not hopelessly stupid. I mean, they beat the shit out of everything, but they're not hopeless. But in the short term, I have a very strong suspicion that we will end up with American troops in the Soviet Union. We're gonna have some kind of blue helmet peacekeeping force, trying to keep the Armenians away from the throats of the Azerbaijanis, or the Abkhazians away from the Armenians or some God-forsaken thing. I keep waiting for the rest of the shoes to drop, and the final shoe is not gonna drop until the United States Army and Marines are actually in the Soviet Union, patrolling streetcorners, where everybody knows we're there. I don't think they've fallen quite as far as they have got to fall just yet. I don't think they've reduced to true abject defeat. I mean, just complete, utter, abject defeat, at the level that, like, Germany and Japan went through. And by then, who knows? They may come back and be as well off as Germany and Japan. That's not a weak country. They handed Nazi Germany their ass. They're not without resources. They're not 10 feet high like the Pentagon wanted us to believe for 40 years, but they're not a hopeless bunch of weak sisters.
LP: So, in 40 years from now they'll be selling us consumer electronics?
BS: Well, I don't know what the hell they'll be selling us, but I would imagine that they would be able to do something.
LP: So, what made you decide to be a science-fiction writer in the first place?
BS: I don't think I could really help it. I think I was doomed from an early age to become a science fiction writer. It just seems to suit me. You know, I thought of becoming a journalist-I actually took a journalism degree, because I was smart, I figured I'd never make a living as a science fiction writer. Most people never do. And a year ago, or three years, I actually did earn a living as a journalist-that was when I was doing Hacker Crackdown, and writing lots of non-fiction. I finally got some feeling for what it might be like to be a working, career journalist, and I'm glad I'm a science-fiction writer. I don't wanna be a journalist. I mean, my hat is off to the guys who go out there and do it every day under a deadline. They're some amazing people, and I've come to be close friends with some of them, especially computer industry journalists-I don't really know that many straight journalists. But given my druthers, this is good. It's good for me. I'm not a real energetic person, but I'm kind of restless in a very peculiarly intellectual way, and I'm not somebody who has very much discipline. I could not make it in the sciences, because I don't have it together enough. I've got way too much imagination and not enough coherence. In journalism, you get awfully tired of getting your facts straight. There's just no end to that, it's a pain, you know?
LP: "You mean I have to confirm this with someone else?"
BS: Well, I mean, in order to say something which bears some resemblance of the truth, rather than just the way that would be really neat if it was.
LP: "Sharon Stone did sleep with Clinton on LAX runway 1."
BS: Yeah. I don't think that worked out, but...
DB: Didn't stop NBC.
BS: Well, it did, actually. It did stop them-that's why they're so fucking embarrassed right now. I mean, it's humiliating when you do something like NBC did. It's a terrible thing for a journalist to go through. It's a crushing blow to one's ego and one's reputation in the field. Since they are paid so very little, that ego and that reputation and that series of contacts that make up the social milieu of journalism is extremely important. In journalism, if you get a reputation as being somebody who's a cowboy or a geek or...
LP: A Janet Cooke.
BS: Yeah, or just a fraud. A fraud or a plagiarist. You're sunk. You're through. You're a laughingstock.
LP: So who were you reading in your youth that inspired you to say, "Yeah. Science fiction. This is it."
BS: Well, everybody. I read very widely. I read more British SF writers than most American writers did because I happened to be living overseas at the time. But I've always considered myself a, sort of a soi-disant, latter generation British New Wave author. I get along with those guys. I have more respect for Brian Aldiss than I do for any other living SF writer, and I'm quite the Ballard devotee. I like Moorcock and I'm a lifetime subscriber to Interzone. <laughs> Have the complete run of Interzone, used to be a columnist. But I would read anybody. I read very, very widely in the field in the 60's, 70's ...even into the early 80's. And then around '84 and '85, that's when I broke out of the journeyman phase of my career and I actually started to understand what the hell it was that I wanted to do in particular. Nowdays, I don't really read very widely in the genre anymore. I feel like I've got the bit between my teeth and I'm not really that interested anymore in trying to affect the way that other people write science fiction. I'm interested in doing the the kind of things I know that only I can do.
LP: At what point did you realize that cyberpunk and the Mirrorshades group, which was your early working title for what became cyberpunk, was a movement? When did you say, "Hey! Let's put on a show!"
BS: I think the first time I realized that was when I took one of William Gibson's manuscripts to a Turkey City and showed it around. It was a very early one. I'd never met Gibson, I had been corresponding with him, and he sent me a typed-up manuscript of this thing he was doing on his legendary Hermes typewriter, you know? <laughs> I think it was "Burning Chrome"-it might have been "Johnny Mnemonic", I don't remember which.
LP: Which year was this? 1980?
BS: I'm really bad with dates. It was early, though: it must have been '82, '83. It was one of the last original Turkey Cities, in [Lew] Shiner's house, and I brought this thing along. It was extremely rare to bring in a manuscript to Turkey City where the author wasn't there.
LP: Sort of hard for him to get much out of it, huh?
BS: Well, it was somewhat rude, because you don't really require people to read manuscripts at Turkey City unless they're there and you can fucking mess with their heads. I mean, people are putting their egos at risk, they're bringing this stuff in, they're expecting to get lambasted...anyway, it was just against the etiquette of the workshop, but I brought it in anyway, because I thought it was a really interesting piece of work.
WAIT: Here are your fajitas. <Sounds of plates being moved.>
WAIT: What else can I get you guys? A couple more plates just to take up room?
DB: If I could have some iced tea...
WAIT: I'll be back with some.
BS: Thanks.
LP: So. Ya wanna pause while we eat?
BS: Might as well. I ought to finish that particular thread of thought. I brought this thing in, this manuscript-I thought it was hard to read in a funny kind of way, but it was getting into some very interesting material that was sort of recognizable, but treated in a genuinely new fashion. And I went and showed it around. To general popular disinterest, actually-except for Shiner, who read it and said, "You know, this thing is shit hot. This is it, you know? This is really something. This is happening." And I thought, "You know, he's right. Lew is right. We should get into this more. We should understand what it is that this guy up in Vancouver is doing." I think that was the first time that I realized that this is more than a good story, this is a whole way to do SF that hasn't been done before.
<pause for food>
LP: I understand that Ellison bought your first novel, Involution Ocean.
BS: That's true. <pause> It was the fourth Harlan Ellison Discovery novel. I was a Harlan Ellison Discovery.
MS: So was Dan Simmons.
BS: So was Terry Carr, though I never understood that. Terry Carr was already a very well known short story writer and even an anthologist, and yet he had a Harlan Ellison Discovery novel. Actually, a pretty good one. There was Arthur Byron Cover, still around in the field, tangentially, and a guy named James Sutherland-I have no idea in Hell what happened to him-and Terry Carr and me.
LP: And you were the last?
BS: Yeah, I was the last.
LP: So, how did Ellison come to buy that? What workshop were you at?
BS: Clarion. He sent me to Clarion. He wanted me to go. I didn't want to go. I thought would be a waste of my time. He paid for me to go.
LP: Whoa. How did you meet up with Ellison in the first place?
BS: Turkey City. He was at Aggiecon. The guy literally took it upon himself to go out into the boonies, looking for people who could write. He was very evangelical about it. It was a cause, it was his crusade. He didn't hesitate to dig in his back pocket and try and affect the course of what was going on. Yes, he actually sent me to Clarion. He didn't pay for my airplane ticket. But he paid my tuition.
LP: Which was not inconsiderable.
BS: Well, I was just some college kid, who was hanging out with these sci-fi weirdos. I was not a professional. I was only 20 years old. But he made a deliberate attempt to do this so that I could be indoctrinated into the "fraternity", as it were, of science fiction writers. And he was doing a lot of the same things for Lisa Tuttle at the time. He was always very fond of Lisa. Lisa was another very prominent Turkey Citizen at the time.
LP: How did the Turkey City Workshops get started?
BS: They were just an emanation of fandom in the early '70s. It was just people showing up at conventions, and some of them were wannabes that had manuscripts, and they just sort of left them around on a table once, and people got to know one another. You know, just guys. It was more or less an accident. People just coagulated, because they had the same things in common. It was this irrepressible little bubble of energy going on.
LP: So who was in the first Turkey City group? It was you, and Tuttle, and Tom Reamy...
BS: I think the first one I ever went to was Turkey City 3, which was at Lisa Tuttle's house in Houston. And I also went to Turkey City 5, at Tom Reamy's house in some God-forsaken small town in North Texas. But I was a fairly late Turkey Citizen. I was not a founding Turkey Citizen. You should ask Steve Utley about it. Ask Joe Pumilia. Or ask Lisa, if you go to Scotland. I didn't start it. I wasn't high energy. I wasn't that hip. I was younger than everybody else, the youngest Turkey Citizen for quite some time. I was like the enfant terrible... Can I steal one of these?
DB: Yes.
BS: Cool. I'm still hungry, man. I was up late last night working on the book. I've got some hash browns, these aren't my type.
DB: Well, ask for a menu and order more food if you want. I've got plenty of money.
BS: That's brave of you. Especially for a guy wearing a fucking blue box. [Editor's note: Dwight was wearing a T-shirt for the legendary hacker zine 2600 that day] Too poor to even pick up your own phone tab.
LP: And more Dr. Pepper.
WAIT: Sure, but I'm going to have to charge you for that. You only get one free refill.
LP: Oh, fine.
BS: I could go for some dessert. Hey, what have we got that's like viscous and sticky and sweet? You got a cheesecake, maybe?
LP: Nah, how about a jug of syrup?
BS: Is it congealed?
WAIT: We don't have any cheesecake. We've got, uh, key lime pie, toll house pie, uh, coconut cream pie, flan, and a chocolate brownie with a layer of cream cheese...
BS: Bring me some coconut cream pie, please. That sounds really toxic. I have to add, I don't always eat coconut cream pie. I have to have high levels of blood sugar for the taxing work of composition.
DB: <aside> I wasn't going to ask him questions, but I changed my mind.
BS: Just if I'm imortalizing that for all time, I don't want people to think that I normally stuff myself with pie at breakfast.. This is my first meal of the day.
DB: Lawrence, go ahead.
LP: No.
DB: Now that I've got a mouthful of fucking joe.
LP: Speak clearly into the microphone.
DB: With your permission, I'd like to play "Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist Checklist".
BS: Yeah? You own "Bruce's Sterling's Zeitgeist Checklist"?
DB: No. I'd like to play "Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist Checklist".
BS: I have no idea what you're talking about, Dwight.
DB: Let me throw out a concept and get your reaction. Chaos theory.
BS: Yeah?
DB: Oh, fuck it! Somebody ask him a question.
LP: So what do you think are the most intellectually sexy technologies bouncing around right now?
BS: Oh, right. Well, "zeitgeist" and "intellectual sexiness" are two different things. I mean, zeitgeist tends to be extremely social. Zeitgeist is stuff like that weird, abberant fondness for massive tattoos that's happening now. That has really very little to do with intellectual sexiness. It's very revealing of the underlying structure of society, and the willingness of people to take extreme measures with their own bodies. But intellectual sexiness is a different thing. It's more or less confined to the scientific and technological communities. I like to work pretty hard on my intellectual sexiness list, which I do at MCC during Armadillocon. I'll probably come up with another one. It's hard to do really, since I've started doing my F&SF science column, 'cause now I'm actually doing science journalism on a regular basis-I'm sort of too close to it to tell. You have to be kind of remote, and just sort of skim the very top in order to get it.
LP: And not get lost in the details.
BS: Yeah. Uhm...intellectual sexiness. Internet is very intellectually sexy right now. National Information Infrastructure, whatever. Public key cryptography: extremely intellectually sexy thing. It's like, way over the top. There's an article on that, the Kevin Kelly article, "E-Money and the Technologies Of Disconnection", that appeared in, I think, Whole Earth Review, a issue or so back [now available as part of Kelly's new book, Out of Control - Ed.]. One of the most intensely intellectually radical articles I've ever read. I mean, I read that thing, like six times, and it still doesn't quite click with me.
<WAITRON returns>
DB: One of those chocolate brownie things with a lot of chocolate.
BS: I wonder how much brownie you could eat without bursting.
WAIT: They're switching out the canisters in the soda right now.
LP: So, do I get a refill on the next one as well?
WAIT: Yeah.
LP: Yeah. Okay.
MS: This is why "no ice."
DB: So you think that public key cryptography and the whole notion of digital cash, are one of the intellectually hottest things going right now?
BS: Yeah.
DB: Do you think that it's so hot that we're going the Federal Government involved?
BS: Yeah, it started yesterday actually.
DB: I was going to ask you about that. Do you see this as the start?
BS: Well, it's certainly not the start, because cryptography has been very closely policed for a long time, but it's a significant development in an ongoing social battle which has been heating up considerably lately.
LP: Okay.
[While BS has been talking, MS has been explaining the Austin Code Works/Phil Zimmerman subpoena story to LP.]
BS: I have not seen any indictments yet. 
DB: Yet.
BS: I mean, a subpoena is not an indictment. A subpoena is just a sign that some muckety-muck somewhere has got a wild hair, and he's looking around to figure out who the hell he can bust.
DB: Yeah, but remember what somebody else said in a different context. "A Grand Jury will indict a ham sandwich if the DA tells them to."
BS: I believe that. But a subpoena is a legitimate part of the justice process. I mean, you want the prosecutor to have some fucking vague idea of what it is he's trying to prosecute.
MS: Like Steve [Jackson].
BS: You don't want him to just, like, read the New York Times and go do it. You want the guy to know what's going on. And the way to find out what's going on-I mean, you can depend on informants to a great extent, you can depend on public cooperation and so forth-but when it comes to the crunch, you gotta fucking grab somebody, buttonhole him, and make him tell you what's going on. It's like, "Tell me what's going on, or go to fucking prison." You know? I don't know if any indictments are going to come out of this, I don't know what the hell's going on, but these guys, these cypherpunk people have been yelling from the rooftops that they have criminal intent. Did you see that BlackNet thing?
DB: Yeah.
LP: Explain for our readers.
Continue with part 2 of Under Heavy Weather: An Interview with Bruce Sterling
Jump to part 3 of Under Heavy Weather: An Interview with Bruce Sterling

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