It’s an eccentric work of scientific fabulation that’s my all-too-topical farewell to Belgrade. One of my homes for many years. I could likely sell this yarn and print it somewhere, but why, if no one in the Balkans would see it anyway? An ambivalent gift for Orthodox Christmas. Balkan Cosmology …

*In the American Civil Cold War, what comes around, goes around. Are You For 86? by Bruce Sterling Leggy Starlitz emerged from behind cool smoked glass to the raucous screeching of seagulls. Hot summer sun glinted fiercely off the Pacific. The harbor smelled of tar, and of poorly processed animal…

Well, that was Austin — in 2001, twenty long years ago. This, too, shall pass. CODE by Bruce Sterling Even in death, Louis’s bulk had wedged him firmly into his work chair. Van felt swift, unthinking rage. How could Louis do this to him? Van had been working on a…

Villangomez and his home town I’m in Ibiza presently, and me and the artificially intelligent machine-translators are busy with the works of Señor Maria Villangomez i Llobet, known as “Marianu” to his friends. Villangomez is by far the best known Ibizan poet, though he’s little cherished on the mainland, even…

Social Codes at Feral File by Bruce Sterling “Feral File” is a small and closely focussed NFT art market where the ten curated exhibits double as a gallery show. Everything sold out. It sold so rapidly that the site crashed. These are good times for the non-fungible token. You…

*Frank Belknap Long was a junior member of the Lovecraft Circle, and I enjoy the raw flummery of all this science-fictional atemporality riffing. It’s like a bubbling stew of Lovecraftian suspension-of-disbelief devices. “Einstein and John Dee are strange bedfellows.” *It’s especially good when a victim of cosmic horror is “scrawling…

*Wearing the art critic hat. First posted in my Wired blog “Beyond the Beyond.” An Essay on the New Aesthetic by Bruce Sterling 04.02.12 I witnessed the New Aesthetic panel at South by Southwest 2012. It was a significant event and a good thing to see. If you know nothing…

Ibiza and Formentera: Lizards and Islands by Antonia Maria Cicer Balafia Postals, 2020 a review by Bruce Sterling This is a nonfiction book by an Ibiza-born herpetologist, and it’s meant to acquaint foreigners with the island’s local lizards. Ibiza abounds with psychedelic lizards, bright and colorful lizard-memes which adorn sun-hats…

First published in “Beyond #1,” Sun Architecture, 2009. White Fungus As I was explaining to you last time, I named the boy ‘Vitruvius.’ I was younger then, and maybe a little too proud of my architecture degree. It was one of the last, full, cum-laude degrees from a major European…