Geodog

Bruce Sterling on book tour

I went and saw Bruce Sterling at Cody's Books tonight. I had never seen or heard him before, and didn't know what to expect. It was apparently the last stop on this part of his tour promoting his latest book, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, and, as he confessed to us in the beginning, he was fried. He was still wickedly funny, and somewhat combative with the audience. He has a very sharp tongue, and he either has quite a few bon mots stored up, or he thinks incredibly fast on his feet. A few nuggets gleaned from his talk:

Software is headed to where book publishing is now, a shabby impoverished gentility.
Now that I hang out with industrial designers, I can go into WalMart without being revolted by the vertigo of consumer excess.
[Belief in the afterlife is] a psychotic misapprehension of reality.
Having bolts through your head would be better than getting Alzheimer's.

While Sterling was very funny, I actually didn't get much of a feel for the ideas in his book. Based on positive reviews I've seen elsewhere, I've ordered it from the library (once again using Jon Udell's bookmarklet), but I would not have bought it based on his talk.

Note to self: write a very nice thank you letter to Jon for saving me all this money with his bookmarklet.