Even thirty-four years later, the short speech retains its unique enlightening power to reveal an unyielding spirit questing for its own form of immortality.

Bruce Sterling talks about one of the possible reasons why game designers are not largely well esteemed like other artists: This kind of art heavily relies on the platforms keeping obsolete over time, which prevented artists from learning the indispensable experience from the ancestors’ work, let alone encouraging artists to build the innovation upon the foundation.

In addition, computer games are more like films: Both creative processes require a lot of money and therefore creators tend to solicit the mainstream preferences for the maximum repayment instead of introducing new things, let alone representing their own artistic spirit.

And the best art is all about innovative expressions, usually through rebellious and controversial forms, but it typically has nothing to do with financial remuneration, which partly accounts for it’s the individuals rather than the corporations that are more often regarded as true artists:

Real artists seldom creates commodities or clichés. They just express their soul through their artworks and sometimes the act of creating their artworks. Accordingly, they can stand material deprivation for the spiritual elevation, but the corporations can’t.

Computer games are especially vulnerable to this because they live and breathe through the platform. But something rather similar is happening today to fiction as well…. What you see in science fiction nowadays is an amazing tonnage of product that is shuffled through the racks faster and faster…. If a science fiction paperback stays available for six weeks, it’s a miracle. Gross sales are up, but individual sales are off… Science fiction didn’t even used to bepublished in book form, when a science fiction book came out it would be in an edition of maybe five hundred copies and these weirdo Golden Age SF fans would cling on to every copy as if it were made of platinum…. But now they come out and they are made to vanish as soon as possible. In fact to a great extent they’re designed by their lame hack authors to vanish as soon as possible. They’re cliches because cliches are less of a cognitive load. You can write a whole trilogy instead, bet you can’t eat just one… Nevertheless they’re still objects in the medium of print. They still have the cultural properties of print.

Bruce Sterling claims he is fond of the cyberpunk theme that well-disciplined, intelligent, technically skilled people one day go rogue, recognise the prison imposed clandestinely by their society, aware that the solution will never be given by the politicians, and finally challenge the pop culture in their own ways.

Okay. Those of you into SF may recognize the classic rhetoric of cyberpunk here. Alienated punks, picking up computers, menacing society…. That’s the cliched press story, but they miss the best half. Punk into cyber is interesting, but cyber into punk is way dread. I’m into technical people who attack pop culture. I’m into techies gone dingo, techies gone rogue – not street punks picking up any glittery junk that happens to be within their reach – but disciplined people, intelligent people, people with some technical skills and some rational thought, who can break out of the arid prison that this society sets for its engineers. People who are, and I quote, “dismayed by nearly every aspect of the world situation and aware on some nightmare level that the solutions to our problems will not come from the breed of dimwitted ad-men that we know as politicians.” Thanks, Brenda!

Bruce Sterling also tells me the biggest enemy for science-fiction is the time. To combat it, one must find out the immortal desire of humankind.

Okay. Now I live in the same world you live in, I hope I’ve demonstrated that I face a lot of the same problems you face… Believe me there are few things deader or more obsolescent than a science fiction novel that predicts the future when the future has passed it by. Science fiction is a pop medium and a very obsolescent medium. The fact that written science fiction is a prose medium gives us some advantages, but even science fiction has a hard time wrapping itself in the traditional mantle of literary excellence… we try to do this sometimes, but generally we have to be really drunk first. Still, if you want your work to survive (and some science fiction does survive, very successfully) then your work has to capture some quality that lasts. You have to capture something that people will search out over time, even though they have to fight their way upstream against the whole rushing current of obsolescence and innovation.

Just like Nietzsche, Bruce Sterling instructs me to think about spiritual ancestors in history and the meaning of life.

There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn’t come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you’re here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.

Furthermore, Bruce Sterling also alerts authors should never lower their standards just because of jumping outside the mainstream aesthetic norms.

To live outside the aesthetic laws you must be honest. Know what you’re doing; don’t settle for the way it looks just cause everybody’s used to it. If you’ve got a palette of 2 million colors, then don’t settle for designs that look like a cheap four-color comic book. If you’re gonna do graphic design, then learn what good graphic design looks like; don’t screw around in amateur fashion out of sheer blithe ignorance. If you write a manual, don’t write a semi-literate manual with bad grammar and misspellings. If you want to be taken seriously by your fellows and by the populace at large, then don’t give people any excuse to dismiss you. Don’t be your own worst enemy. Don’t put yourself down.

Overall, this edifying speech delivered by Bruce Sterling inspires me to contemplate what kind of immortal themes intrigue me most:

On love, responsibility, and liberation: For example, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet can’t move me, because I despise those hothead who love without any sense of responsibility toward their families. But overall, I still appreciate the liberation for love, including forms such as the necessary rebellion.
On exploration, exploitation and collision: It is a heavy topic. But the entrepreneurial exploration doesn’t always mean well for the aboriginal and nature. Sometimes it leads to the atrocious exploitation on the less aggressive species, as seen in the atrocities suffered by American Indians. Do a advanced civilization always imply a higher morality? I still remember my shock at learning some cannibals who saw the modern society as brutal, because they are kill others not just for food! It would be extremely interesting to view our civilization from different angles or their collisions caused by the fundamental differences in their cultures, worldviews, and societies.
On science, technology and society: As far as I’m concerned, history is merely a kind of fiction claimed by someone as non-fiction. What particularly intrigues me about history is how it depicts the impacts—whether good or bad—were exerted on the society, then how they have been integrated into the culture or cleared out of it, and how they have even been affecting me nowadays. Some of them are life-changing and game-changing, some are malevolent and insidious, others are yet to be observed and explored. If fiction can anticipate scientific developments, as in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, it would be a great honor for the author to be a predictor.

Thanks to Bruce Sterling, I will strive to discover more interesting spirits among excellent artworks in the past. I will also base all my future fiction on these three motifs and won’t cut corners in my artworks.