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Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix, The Zenith Angle, Zeitgeist) is an internationally bestselling author, journalist, editor, columnist, and critic. He is perhaps best known as the author of ten visionary science-fiction novels and as a founder of the cyberpunk movement. He was also the editor of the quintessential cyberpunk anthology, Mirrorshades. Sterling's much-heralded nonfiction includes The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier and The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things. A renowned expert on technology, Sterling has appeared on ABC's Nightline, the BBC's The Late Show, MTV, TechTV, and Wired, where he is a featured blogger, as well as in Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fortune, Nature, La Stampa, La Repubblica, and many other venues. Sterling splits his time among the cities of Austin, Turin, and Belgrade.
Advance praise for Robot Artists & Black Swans Sterling's latest collection is rich and wide, a cross between Primo Levi and Jorge Luis Borges--with a touch of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. I love it. --Greg Bear, author of The Unfinished Land Bruce Sterling literally takes you to Hell and back and back in this sprawling, delirious tour of an Italy jarred just slightly off-kilter, parallel universe, nineteenth-century terrorists and bicephalous recluses, cigar-smoking mummies and wandering performance artists who happen to be wheelchairs. --Peter Watts, author of The Freeze-Frame Revolution Bruce Sterling's Italian short fiction is like an Asti Spumante from the vineyard where futurism was first fermented. --Charles Stross, author of the Merchant Princes Series Utterly unlike Sterling and unmistakably the work of Sterling: Robot Artists & Black Swans is a sardonic, madcap tour through the grand passions and strange centuries of Italian sf. --Cory Doctorow, author of Walkaway Set largely in Turin, Italy, this urbane collection of seven stories from futurist Sterling (Pirate Utopia) reflects the author's wholehearted embrace of both the post-human future and Italian culture. The narrator of the 2061-set Kill the Moon is charitably embarrassed by the sentimentality of his countrymen ( Why are we Italians the only people who still believe that space flight is romantic? ) as they giddily celebrate Italy's belated mission to the moon. For readers unsatisfied with only one future Italy, Black Swan offers a tour through a series of alternate versions of the country, imagining a technologically advanced Italy built on the computer work of fantasist Italo Calvino but threatened by the skullduggery of underworld kingpin Nicholas Sarkozy. In Pilgrims of the Round World, a couple facing a long journey from 1463 Turin to the court of the Queen of Jerusalem in Cyprus argue over the value of art just as ferociously as a 2187 art dealer and a post-human anthropologist debate the nature of robotic creation in Robot in Roses. Sterling's clever, compassionate work will appeal to fans of intelligent cyberpunk. --Publishers Weekly It's all here, this time with an Italian flavor: the inventive tech, the meticulously detailed futures, the stylish and sardonic prose, the creative adjectival combinations. Set in Turin, Rome, and an upgraded Hell (Italian designers are good), these stories could only have been written by Bruce Sterling. Treat yourself to one of the most original voices in science fiction. --Nancy Kress, author of After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall Bruno Argento is the Calvino of the Cyberpunks, and in this new collection Bruce Sterling channels his Turinese alter ego to conjure dark and wondrous visions of alternate Europes past, present and future. A perfectly curated selection of the best recent works from a living master of short form SF, Robot Artists & Black Swans shows what can be achieved when a writer fully embraces the possibilities of becoming a character in one of his own stories. --Christopher Brown, author of Failed State A fantastic fantascienza concoction of percolated ideas and concepts . . . These complex fantasies of Italy relate to universal truths and desires conjured up by Texan Bruce Sterling's alter ego Bruno Argento as he sips his Lavazza Red coffee with a well-selected pasta. Bravo. --Starburst Sterling emerges as an Italian cultural figure, within hailing distance of Italo Calvino and Federico Fellini. --Rudy Rucker, author of The Hacker and the Ants Praise for Bruce Sterling And if you miss the sensation of having science fiction stretch your brainmeat a bit, of those powerful and irreversible up-endings of the way you see certain things, and you're not aware of Bruce Sterling? Go find him. --Strange Horizons His highly caffeinated energy is hard to resist. --Publishers Weekly Bruce Sterling has managed to pen a delivery vessel for a futuristic, anarchistic dystopian idea of human potential. --New York Journal of Books Science fiction that makes the rest of near-future SF look toylike by comparison. It's as if Sterling is the only writer paying attention to what's happening in the real world. --Locus Love him or hate him, Bruce Sterling always has something important to say. --Booksmark Magazine Bruce Sterling remains one of the key SF writers. --SFRevu
