Posthuman Blues

It's official: Bruce Sterling is really cool.

Let me qualify that statement:

He gets around. He's a "reality hacker." He watches the future emerge from the ground up and has an uncanny sense of which nodal points to eyeball; come to think of it, he's actually a little bit like the heroine from William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition." And -- get this -- he's stylish. He's nicely groomed; he's got cool glasses. And that earring doesn't look the least bit like the affectation it would be on any other writer. I've been to science fiction conventions before, and without fail the author guests basically look like they've been randomly selected from the Motor Vehicle Bureau. Not Sterling. Sterling looks the part of the post-millennial, idea-driven cyberpunk conveyed in his nonfiction (notably his European blog travelogue a while ago).

No, you don't have to know how an author comes across as a person to appreciate his/her literary contributions. In fact, most of the time it's best you didn't. But with Sterling -- and this is the anomaly -- it doesn't hurt. We need more cool SF writers.

Note to self: The photoblogging idea is neat. Buy digital camera!