Telepolis Interview (Jun 02)
"Humans are very aggressive and scrappy, and go to war at the drop of a hat. However, a standard land war is no longer going to work as it is no longer technically possible. There are no fronts, the commanding headquarters of generals can be smashed instantly and are number-one targets, supply lines can be interdicted at will, trans-border invasions by organized national armies are heavily disapproved by large coalitions of nations. War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize "world peace" even when we get it. Therefore, events that Queen Victoria would recognize as outrages, frontier skirmishes or minor popular rebellions will be reclassified as "war." And so will major atrocities such as biological warfare and surreptitious nuclear explosions. They used to be seen as insane or unthinkable acts of madmen. But if they take place they'll be called "war" too. And there will still be no conventional war."

SciFi.com Interview (Mar 01)
"If you have to summarize Tomorrow, Now in one word, it's all about what it feels like to live the 21st century, what it feels like to physically live the 21st century. It's very meat-centered. It's all about how things are touched and felt. It's very visceral. It's all about human flesh, instead of cyber-centric. It's a different way to think about the future, really. It's a long meditation on physically living through the coming years. But it starts with infants and ends with death."

Interview/Discussion from The WELL's "Inkvue" Forums (Jan 01)
"Once I got my head around this idea that 'the future' was bogus, I was able to mess around with a lot of the invisible assumptions in science fiction.   I found that my science fiction got a lot more effective and spooky when it was set in places like Chattanooga rather than the rings of Saturn. Not that there might not someday be people around the rings of Saturn; it's just that the rings of Saturn won't really be settled until they've somehowe become a place rather like Chattanooga.  A place with a sense of native locale, an embedded history, a workable zeitgeist and genius locus, a functional society and economy, that sort of thing. Complicated, boring things. History."

Infinity Plus Interview (Jan 00)
"Well, if a middle-aged professional who's been married more than half his life, has two kids, lives in a mansion and makes more money than 99% of the world's population can be called a "punk," yeah, sure, I'm a cyberpunk. On the other hand, if you're a science fiction writer and your "ideology and literary character" can be adequately summarized with one word, you're probably not working hard enough."

Bruce Sterling vs. DJ Spooky (Fall 99)
"I'm trying to sell my Dead Media book now. I am doing a book on obsolescence in media. And I want to talk about media that are no longer used. You know, it's a very hot thing in the DJ line of work. You see all these guys who are into analog synths, and there's like this weird black market in like thermeotic valves and vacuum tubes, right? Because they are 'spankier sounding.' They're like hard to get now. There's these digital guys who have these names now like DJ Black Ninja Electron, you know, as if they'd come from the twenty-third century. And you actually look at the stuff they're using, and it's like this weird, flaking crap out of the mid-70s that's held together with duct tape."

Slashdot Interview (Oct 99)
"I don't 'whoa' real easy these days, but there's (a) Dolly the cloned sheep, (b) Doogie the genius mouse, (c) MEMS microelectronic silicon engines on a chip, and (d) that weird crowd at Brandeis University, who are trying to evolve and grow artificial machines in a cyberspace, and then manufacture them as working gizmos in real life. They have little web-movies of those Karl Sims-style gimmicks just floppin' around in there. That's one of the most unspeakable things I've ever witnessed. Weirder yet, the thing they're doing in that lab is really close to the central gimmick of my Hugo-awarding-winning story "Taklamakan" (1998). That story came out just last year, and here they are trying to ship product already. Will wonders never cease!"

ACM Interview by Eleven-Year-Old Sam Jaffee (May 99)
"Fertilize Your Eccentricities!"

GORP Interview (Aug 99)
"I think the Greenhouse situation is a lot like alcoholism. It isn't one moment or one single drink that does you in. Can there be a single 'a-ha moment' when you realize that civilization has moved from social drinking (of oil and coal) into a substance-dependent, blackout situation? As an individual, when you're on that slippery slope, there probably is some moment of revolt when your sense of dignity is offended. You wake up in a pool of your own vomit for instance, or find your clothes ripped off by some total stranger. Time to put the cork in the bottle. Find something more life-affirming to do with your time."

CTHEORY Dead Media Project Interview (Mar 99)
"I very much doubt that TVs and PCs will 'merge.' There are dozens of different kinds of 'television.' Broadcast television, satellite television, state-supported television, video rentals, security television, industrial training television, cable television (on many different networks), regional television, national networks, television in different languages, PAL, NTSC, HDTV...Just because we call one glass screen a 'television' and the other glass screen a 'computer' doesn't mean that we end up with one glass screen that holds everything. It's like imagining that bicycles, motorcycles, cars and tractors will all converge because they all use 'wheel technology.'"

Viridian Interview from Wired News (Dec 98)
"The greenhouse effect was never a political decision. We were never asked to vote to fill the atmosphere with CO2. You're never going to get a ballot asking whether your house ought to wash away, or if the local forest ought to catch fire. Instead, you're just going to find yourself somehow doing weird, anomalous things, such as walking around in shorts and sandals during Christmas. That's not because of your Republican senator; that's because of that car in your driveway, basically."

SciFi.Com Chat Transcript (Nov 98)
"The next wave of wierdness is biological."

Telepolis Interview (June 98)
"And now everybody is going into biotechnology. This sheep, the clone, Richard Seed, the human genome project - it smells a lot like Silicon Valley did. But it's definitely a profoundly more dangerous technology than laptops. If you have a system crash here, no big deal. But if you hardwire some teens with the genome of corn or something like that, you can have a biotechnological catastrophe that could last as long as the eye can see! Well, plutonium is pretty bad, but at least it does not replicate by itself. It's gonna be stormy weather for the next thirty years. And at the far end of it, I think there's gonna be a cognitive revolution. People are going to combine the computation thing and the genetic biological thing and are going to start actually tinkering with people's thought processes in an industrial fashion. And if you thought LSD was a lot of fun, wait until this really works."

SFRevu Interview (Oct 97)
"I think cyberpunk writers in particular are not really into wonder, we're into ecstasy and dread."

SF Site Interview at LoneStarCon 2 (Aug 97)
"I used to worry about the Internet spiraling out of control. That happens in the new book I'm writing, and it leads to a generalized social breakdown in the U.S.. I think that's a realistic scenario, but only about 15% realistic."

Austin Chronicle Interview (Apr 97)
"I really feel that for my generation in science fiction, the web is our spaceship. For Jules Verne it was hot air balloons, for Arthur Clarke it was manned spacecraft, and for us it's definitely media and telecommunications. But that doesn't mean that something else won't come along later."

Nova Express Interview (Early 97)
"And we will not be the first civilization destroyed by environmental disaster either. I've spent some time out in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, a while ago, looking at the old Anasazi ruins out in the Southwest. There's a people who basically bootstrapped theirselves up from corn farmers up to the point of a pretty well advanced Neolithic civilization. They had little skyscrapers in there, and pottery and textiles and the whole nine yards. They ran out of water -- they fucking died, man. There was no appeal from this. I mean, imagine a couple of Anasazis sitting around over their pottery saying, 'Well, what do you think we ought to do about the fact that there's no rain today, Two Dogs?' 'Well, Striped Blanket, I think what we ought to do is die.' There is no alternative. It's the weather, man. You can't do fuck about the weather."

Boing Boing Interview (May 92)
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. If you put a guy with 800 channels of TV next to a guy who knows how to go to a library and do serious research, there's no question who's gonna know the skinny..."