WillAffleckUW: Hey, Bruce. What is your current feeling on the current trends in fiction – in book form, manga, anime, TV, and film – have we gone away from hard SF towards science fiction focused on relationships and societies, or is this just a surface trend as we deal with the actual implications of reality and the near future?

Bruce Sterling: We’ve gone away from science because our whole society’s gone away from science. We’re in a science-hostile society now, it’s politically dominated by Creationists and climate denialists.

Bruce Sterling: “Science fiction” was created in an American 1920s society that had heaps of fiction and a little bit of science. Now we’re in a society that’s increasingly indifferent to both its fiction and its science. The core audience of techie guys who might like “hard science fiction,” they wouldn’t have a lot of spare time to read print nowadays. They’re in Maker spaces, they like Kickstarters. They don’t read any 1920s Hugo Gernsback paper mags about scientifiction and crystal-radio sets. They read Slashdot.

Bruce Sterling: I don’t blame ’em. That’s just how it is. I saw that happen, year by year. The trend has been very obvious.

Bruce Sterling: The other stuff, about “focussed on relationships and societies,” that’s a code term for noticing that women are the major creative figures in fantastic print fiction nowadays. Dude, you bet they are. Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Twilight, man, that stuff made an absolute mint. Those huge commercial successes by women writers are practically the only things keeping bookstores open nowadays.