Strange Days: Bruce Sterling

The future. Don't expect flying cars whizzing above a candy-colored skyline, a personal clone doing your laundry, or everything to end with a glorious atomic fireball. In his latest book, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, Bruce Sterling, the Austin-based science fiction writer and cyberpunk guru, offers a view of the future that is neither utopian nor dystopian. It just is what people will someday call "now."

As someone who began contemplating the future 20-odd years ago, Sterling knows just how living in the future feels: He was contemplating a world dominated by lightning-fast communications while I was still coveting my neighbor's Atari. But now that the Internet is part of our daily lives, these early predictions seem almost quaint. "When the late Nineties indeed arrived," Sterling writes, "cyberpunk was not predictive -- it was clichéd."

Sterling's book is much more a hardheaded meditation on the present than a crystal-ball daydream. The needs and desires of future inhabitants of planet Earth are not strikingly different than those of the present, he reminds us, and he constantly excavates the past for clues to our future. It is because of this that Sterling organizes the book-length essay according to the famous Shakespeare soliloquy delivered by Jacques in As You Like It and dubbed "The Seven Ages of Man." Each chapter takes on an eternal facet of existence, such as birth, death, justice, and war, and examines how they will evolve in coming years.

At Sterling's SXSW panel on his book, expect a freewheeling tour through this panoramic view of time and space. As he makes abundantly clear, Sterling is "unafraid to be loudly wrong" and is happy to offer opinions on everything from global politics to education. The book itself feels like a memorable conversation, in which ideas are sometimes joined by necessity, while other times they just flow tangentially from one to another according to the author's whim. This guy was clearly born to razzle-dazzle a room full of tech aficionados.

Take the first chapter, "The Infant," in which Sterling takes on biotechnology while pooh-poohing the whole cloning debate. Sure, a few cloned babies, he predicts, will be produced in the near future and then grow up to be, well, what? Superbabies? No. Superneurotic, says Sterling. He asks us to imagine what it would be like to be a baby, not produced out of love by its parents, but produced out of "their boundary-shattering technological ambition, carried out in the teeth of stiff social resentment." Sterling assures us that this existence would be miserable and that cloned babies will serve very little purpose as long as sex still produces life forms. Instead, Sterling imagines that most biotechnology innovation will focus on the DNA of adaptive single-celled organisms. In the future, people will swallow domesticated germs in pill form, and they will improve our constitution, our mental ability, and check our vital signs for disease.

Sterling likes to point out the oddities that we have become accustomed to: for instance, the way children are already forgoing a canonical education in favor of a hodgepodge of information from Web sites. And, likewise, reading Sterling's book often feels like Web surfing; you are swept from a chapter that focuses on the glutinous, organic design of household objects to an account of modern guerilla warfare. At times, this is overwhelming, but it's impossible not to be impressed by his omnivorous mind and ability to turn a phrase. "If science fiction has any truly profound insight to offer us," he writes, "it's that existence really is weird."