Michael Bruce Sterling (born April 14, 1954) is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his seminal work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which defined the cyberpunk genre. In 2003 he was appointed Professor at the European Graduate School where he is teaching Summer Intensive Courses on media and design. In 2005, he became "visionary in residence" at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
As of January 2006, he was living in Belgrade with his wife, Serbian author and film-maker Jasmina Tesanovic.
Sterling is, along with William Gibson,Jeff Noon, Tom Maddox, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner and Pat Cadigan, one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, as well as its chief ideological promulgator, and one whose polemics on the topic earned him the nickname "Chairman Bruce". He is also one of the first organizers of Turkey City Writer's Workshop. He won Hugo Awards for the novelette "Bicycle Repairman" and the novella "Taklamakan".
His first novel, Involution Ocean, published in 1977, features the world Nullaqua where all the atmosphere is contained in a single, miles-deep crater; the story concerns a ship sailing on the ocean of dust at the bottom, which hunts creatures called dustwhales that live beneath the surface. It is a science-fictional pastiche of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.
In the late 1970s onwards, Sterling wrote a series of stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe: the solar system is colonised, with two major warring factions. The Mechanists use a great deal of computer-based mechanical technologies; the Shapers do genetic engineering on a massive scale. The situation is complicated by the eventual contact with alien civilizations; humanity eventually splits into many subspecies, with the implication that many of these effectively vanish from the galaxy, reminiscent of The Singularity in the works of Vernor Vinge. The Shaper/Mechanist stories can be found in the collection Crystal Express and the collection Schismatrix Plus, which contains the original novel Schismatrix and all of the stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe.
In his hometown of Austin, Texas, the author is known for an annual Christmas yard party that features digital art.
In the 1980s, Sterling edited a series of science fiction newsletters called Cheap Truth, under the alias of Vincent Omniaveritas. He wrote a column called Catscan, for the now-defunct science fiction critical magazine, SF Eye.
He has been the instigator of two projects which can be found on the Web -
In the December 2005 issue of Wired magazine, Sterling coined the term buckyjunk. Buckyjunk refers to future, difficult-to-recycle consumer waste made of carbon nanotubes (aka buckytubes, based on buckyballs or buckminsterfullerene).
Homepage http://blog.wired.com/sterling/