Real futurism means staring directly into your own grave and accepting the slow but thorough obliteration of everyone and everything you know and love. Does this sound like fun? It can be. Just don't expect it to move a lot of product.
-- Bruce Sterling, The Future?
Don't become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don't read Shakespeare. Read Webster's revenge plays. Don't read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he's off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don't read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists.
-- Bruce Sterling, from a speech given at the 1991 Computer Game Developers Conference
Born in 1954, Bruce Sterling is one of today's worldwide top futurists. Sterling writes neither about advances in scientific knowledge, as a hard science fiction writer would, nor soft science fiction about the lives of characters affected by them. Instead, he writes about the everyday society of man as it will be when all the advances have become perfectly mundane; Sterling writes the history of the future.
Besides writing novels and short stories, Sterling is involved with projects deeply investigating details of both the future and the past. The Viridian Movement is dedicated to providing aesthetically and ecologically pleasing industrial design, and working towards a ecologically invisible future for the human race. He also began the Dead Media Project, which explains every detail of dead media (from the Auto-Magic Picture Gun to the Zuse Ziffernrechner) as a way to give perspective to modern media. When he's not writing for projects, books, Wired magazine, or in other forums, Bruce Sterling also serves on the board of directors of the Austin chapter of the EFF.
While Sterling has written plenty of books, his best literary work is in his short stories, which number in the dozens. My personal favorites include Red Star, Winter Orbit and Our Neural Chernobyl, the former written with William Gibson. There's also his killer Shaper/Mechanist universe, which he began in the novel Schismatrix and continued through Crystal Express, along with several short story updates collected in Schismatrix Plus. I should also mention Holy Fire (shamelessly, as I have a writeup there), which contains another well thought out photograph of the future.
Bruce Sterling's books include:
Involution Ocean (1977)
The Artificial Kid (1980)
Schismatrix (1985)
Islands in the Net (1988)
Crystal Express (1989)
The Difference Engine (1990 with William Gibson)
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Order on the Electronic Frontier (1992, non-fiction)
Heavy Weather (1994)
Schismatrix Plus (1996)
Holy Fire (1996)
Distraction (1998)
Zeitgeist (2000)