Bruce Sterling: The Future Of Science Fiction

Bruce Sterling is a science fiction writer, he was born on the 14th of April 1954. Bruce stated that “As I became more familiar with design, it struck me that the futuristic objects and services within science fiction are quite badly designed.”Joshua Glen Tanenbaum, Assistant professor in informatics at UC Irvine, gives a good description on the topic. “Design Fiction uses fictional scenarios to envision and explain possible futures for design.” Science fiction writers often concentrate only on what they want the characters to say, and not so much on the actual design of the sci-fi world itself. One of the reasons for this could be because, that science fiction is very popular in the modern age, and that writers and designers concentrate more

As we can see Bruce is infact right, as our technology moves forward and improves, scientists have been able to bring objects and services within sci-fi related movies and experiments to life in reality today. For example what we thought was impossible about having a tiny screen with all your information within your eye, is now what has become ‘Google Glass’. “Clearly one of the inherent problems for Design Fiction in trying to reveal something about the future is that the users of any prototype or piece of speculative design are the users of today, not tomorrow, so their assumptions and conventions are those of the present”( Charles Beckett). The users of today will have a different interpretation on design and ideas, then the users of tomorrow. “This is a hard problem, and one that even the greatest Science Fiction writers have struggled to overcome. How can you imagine characters whose attitudes and emotions are shaped by an entirely different social and technological landscape? Tricky”( Charles

In a nutshell steampunk creates a world where the combustion engine is obsolete and steam power is our main source of energy. Steampunk is combined with Victorian time architecture and fashion to create a world obsessed with the use of materials such as wood, leather, brass, glass, wax and other early industrial equipment. “The name “Steampunk” was coined in 1987 by author K.W. Jeter, to describe the revisionist histories of himself, Tim Powers, and James Blaylock.”[1] Since K.W. Jeter coined the term steampunk it has seen a steady growth of popularity, “transforming from a fringe genre to a fictional form of broad mass-market appeal with examples in literature film, graphic novels, and computer