Bruce

I spent my last weekend wallowing in my geek roots - visiting local SF convention (SFerakon). I had great amounts of fun, even though the "grown up" parts of my brain were stopping me from engaging in some of the more outrageous activities (like SFerakon Survivor, an activity that looks like a weird younger brother of Fear Factor and Edward Elizabeth Hitler's idea of a nice dinner). Guest of Honor was Bruce Sterling, who was awesome, even up close and personal, even though he is generally an unpleasant person. So why awesome?

Well, he managed to future shock us. :)

Imagine this: a room full of Elbonian SF fans - most of them young, some of them Trekkies, about third of them are either science students or scientist, the rest is usual mix of SMOFs, SFoldster/burnouts and wandering outsiders. All of them think that they are cool, in touch with technopulse, living at the edge of today's imagination, proud in their utter geekiness. Zoom on the speaker: early 50ties red faced, grey haired potbellied glasses-wearing geek, talking with nasal Texas drawl about 20db louder then is actually needed. He looks unhappy and annoyed*, and is taking it all out at us - by subjecting us to each and every one of our favorite SF fantasies (that we never before though of as fantasies) and systematically destroying them.
When I say destroying them, I am being nice: he takes our cherished ideas by their neck, twists them around, cuts them into little pieces, jumps up and down on them, digs a hole, throws them in, pisses on that and drops a huge tombstone on top. When he kills an idea, it stays dead.

At first I was shocked. Then I looked at the audience and saw that unforgettable "deer in headlights" stare on their faces, and almost burst out from laughter. It was so funny! All these ubergeeks being geeked over by a 50+y.o. nerd from Texas (who probably voted republican ;)!!
He was especially nasty towards anything that (in my opinion) smelled of fairy tale new ageism - things like singularity, AI, religion (quote: "if you believe in that, you might as well believe in holy trinity and transubstantiation", which made some people very angry :), and impending golden age brought to us through technology. He also seems to have a red button thingie about climate change - very vehement against people who don't believe in it - almost funny to watch while he elaborates all the bad things that are going to happen, whatever we do. Somehow, though, he still managed to come off as an optimist - world *can* be saved, if rich people decide so. Which is something I find incomprehensible (probably due to not being rich) - why would someone who built his business empire by taking advantage of global commons (our biosphere), decide to repair the damage? That person, after all, isn't going to have problems finding clean water, air, etc. - being rich means that you have access to resources denied to the rest of the population. But I digress.

After Sterling's panel, we all walked out feeling a bit like being hit by a near-light speed proton stream. He held two more panels in the coming days, and I definitely felt old and out of date by the end of it - though still determined to catch up. :)

I am not yet ready to go and visit Mount Fuji, I think....

* Possibly due to not being served enough beer while being harassed by very 20th cen. sf nerds. I do remember that he didn't listen very closely to questions we asked him, but then again, he heard it all, so many many times before...:)