Bruce Sterling wrote influential works like Schismatrix and Islands in the Net, plus he practically invented cyberpunk (with all due respect, of course, to William Gibson and Rudy Rucker). We are serious fans of his work. And if his recent comments about the potential risks of greater-than-human artificial…

There's a must-read interview with legendary Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling over at FortyKey, where Cory Doctorow, Paul Di Filippo and a bunch of other people ask him questions about writing and the future. In particular, Di Filippo asks him what his strategy would be for breaking in as a new science fiction writer in …

Wind-Up Girl author Paolo Bacigalupi's essay over at Wired is both a must read and a quick read. The essay is mostly about how Cyberpunk saved science fiction by shaking up the complacent view of the future that had dominated for decades — but then he broadens out into a more general theory of science fiction as a…

Some people's futures are determined by popular vote: American Idol contestants, class presidents, and people who want to get gay married in California. But what if every aspect of our lives was determined by our reputation and popularity? Would our futures be better, or would the tyranny of the popular spin us into…

Sometimes it seems like science fiction, and especially fantasy, are genres that lend themselves exclusively to trilogies and long-running series. But some of the greatest writers in speculative fiction have only written standalone novels, not series or trilogies.

Rudy Rucker was the first author to win the Philip K. Dick Award, right after Dick's death in 1982. Around that time, Rucker was becoming aware of the new "Cyberpunk" movement and meeting the rebellious authors who were reimagining the union of humans and computers. In this exclusive excerpt from Rucker's new…

Bruce Sterling is known as a prescient futurist, a brilliant science fiction author, and the author of a seminal history of hacking called The Hacker Crackdown. Now he's published a manifesto about why Wikileaks was inevitable.

You might think there's a limit to how weird Rudy Rucker or Bruce Sterling can get, but when they team up, their combined weirdness limit rises exponentially. Witness their strange, unsettling — and highly quotable — story "Good Night, Moon."

The finalists for the 2009 Sidewise Awards, honoring the best in alternate history, have been announced. And just in case the version of you in this universe hasn't already read the novel and five short stories, here's your primer.

In real life, Charles Babbage was a relatively unknown inventor who pioneered early computers. In modern alternate reality fiction, Babbage is a mad genius and steampunk icon. Here are some authors who resurrected Babbage's career a century later.