Bruce Sterling Interview. December 2, 2003.
Friday, August 4th, 2006Audio Options:
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In Tomorrow Now, you travel through Shakespeare’s “seven stages of man” - from As You Like It - as a way of navigating the next fifty years. Why?
Tomorrow Now is a book about nearly everything. But you can’t simply write a book about every aspect of the future because it’s like writing a book about every aspect of the present. So the framework I decided to use was the human body. This book is very body-centric and I try to make human flesh and a human sensorium into a sort of key that opens the future. That’s our real encounter with the future; it’s not these abstract notions of drivers or changes, but the fact that time flows through your body and you can’t really live unless you’re moving into the future at the rate of one second per second.
You say genetic engineering is in its infancy. How is this new baby, so to speak, shaking up our global household?
Genetic engineering is barely getting anywhere and it’s already subject to a great deal of controversy. If you look at what genetic engineering really does, as opposed to the things that it gets headlines for, it seems likely that it’s going to get as close to the DNA as it can and as far away from the products of DNA as it can. The sorts of images we have of genetic engineering are the Frankenstein baby, Dolly the clone, and weird, monstrous, animals. But when you look at what DNA is good for, it doesn’t make sense to put it into humans or animals. It takes too long. DNA moves fast and the best way to carry it is in a microorganism. Let’s say you decide to create a super-baby next month using whatever techniques you found in Craig Venter’s DNA lab. By the time this super-baby is an adult in the year 2024, there will have been another 20 years of further advancement in the field. So why would you make a baby with today’s technology knowing it’s going to be twenty years out of date when it’s grown up and can actually vote?
Moving on to The Soldier now, can you explain the stylistic differences between the military and the paramilitary?
It’s taking people a surprising amount of time to get their head around the idea that the bipolar world of communist/capitalist confrontation is over and we now have a confrontation between New World Order and New World Disorder. In other words, people don’t get it that lawless narco-terrorism actually makes a lot of money and is a newfangled kind of mountain banditry. I mean, terrorism is not terror. When you’re talking about a war on terror, that’s like a war on technique. It’s like having a war on Blitzkrieg when the Germans would suddenly come over the Belgian border in tanks. What we really have is a serious disorder problem. We’ve got breakdowns in the Westphalian nation-state system because governments just can’t control these huge living streams of illicit revenue from narcotics, arms smuggling, human smuggling and so forth. It’s not too hard for the U.S. to bomb anything from orbit. We can send over a B1 bomber from the heartland of the United States and have it literally circumnavigate the planet and drop munitions with absolute precision anywhere. But it turns out to be extremely difficult for the U.S. to walk block to block with military police trying to enforce order on people who really don’t want any aliens around. So if you’re in Serbia you’re in big trouble - sort of - if the U.S. decides to take it upon itself to smash your government. They can smash all the government buildings and knock down the bridges and telecom centers, and so you have a hard time getting around. But if you’re Somalia and there’s nothing left to smash, the U.S. has got a problem. The secret of the struggle between the New World Order and the New World Disorder is that they feed on one another. It’s our own appetite for destruction that underwrites this warlord activity. (more…)
