{"id":4105,"date":"2016-10-03T12:25:01","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T17:25:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.revolutionsf.com\/revblogs\/geekcurmudgeon\/?p=4105"},"modified":"2016-10-05T17:05:47","modified_gmt":"2016-10-05T22:05:47","slug":"cutting-room-floor-bruce-sterling-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revolutionsf.com\/revblogs\/geekcurmudgeon\/2016\/10\/03\/cutting-room-floor-bruce-sterling-donald-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Cutting Room Floor: Bruce Sterling on Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and more"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bruce-sterling-calvino-tumblr\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Back in April on the eve of\u00a0the annual SXSW Interactive Festival, I met with Bruce Sterling for an interview that’ll be in the\u00a0forthcoming Pirate Utopia<\/a><\/em>. While roughly 90% of the original discussion\u00a0made it’s way into the finished book (due out in November from Tachyon Publications), this bit, which I post following the description of the story, was deemed too timely\u00a0an accompaniment\u00a0for\u00a0a tale\u00a0about events set in Fiume following the First World War.<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/a>

Cover by John Coulthart<\/p><\/div>\n

Who are these bold rebels pillaging their European neighbors in the name of revolution? The Futurists! Utopian pirate-warriors of the tiny Regency of Carnaro, the unlikely scourge of the Adriatic Sea. Mortal enemies of communists, capitalists, and even fascists (to whom they are not entirely<\/i> unsympathetic).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The ambitious Soldier-Citizens of Carnaro are lead by a brilliant and passionate coterie of the perhaps insane. Lorenzo Secondari, World War I veteran, engineering genius, and leader of Croatian raiders. Frau Piffer, Syndicalist manufacturer of torpedos at a factory run by and for women. The Ace of Hearts, a dashing Milanese aristocrat, spymaster, and tactical savant. And the Prophet, a seductive warrior-poet who leads via free love and military ruthlessness.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fresh off of a worldwide demonstration of their might, can the Futurists engage the aid of sinister American traitors and establish world domination?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bruce elaborates on\u00a0the current US Presidential Election, the obsession with Donald Trump, and\u00a0other worldly matters.<\/p>\n

\n

RICK: Are we talking about \u201cwe\u201d as the world?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BRUCE<\/span>: Everywhere, really. The people in the US are obsessed with Donald Trump; in Italy they\u2019ve just…they\u2019re not worried about him, they just know he\u2019s [Silvio] Berlusconi. \u201cOh, you\u2019ve got Berlusconi! You\u2019ve got a Berlusconi!\u201d Everybody knows what\u2019s going to happen: he\u2019s going to feather his own nest and have a lot of sex with very young women and everyone around him will be as corrupt as he is, \u2018cause he bullshits all the time. The thing that is attractive about Berlusconi is that he doesn\u2019t make you<\/b> do anything. It\u2019s actually kind of relaxing; everybody knows what he\u2019s going to do: he\u2019s just gonna get up and start bullshitting, laughing, swinging his dick around, cheering for the soccer team, driving fast cars. He\u2019s not particularly malignant or anything, and you know he\u2019s not gonna bother you<\/b>. He\u2019s not going to like, ask you to rise to the level of you better nature. On the contrary, everybody should be in the mud with me! Let\u2019s just relax! Where\u2019s the problem? We\u2019re winning! It\u2019s just very hard to accomplish anything with this bullshit all the time. The fix is in; his cronies aren\u2019t very good, he doesn\u2019t really have a plan, he\u2019s kind of winging it, and it\u2019s very debilitating for stuff like foreign policy, tough economic decisions, infrastructure development, like \u201cWhere are you gonna put the highway?\u201d \u201cWho cares?\u201d It\u2019s hard to get rid of him because everybody\u2019s so demoralized by the louche atmosphere of the fish rotting from the head down. Until the guy just becomes nuts and just like, starts having public orgies and just loses all sense of proportion, then it becomes sort of embarrassing. It\u2019s like, well, if we allow ourselves to be associated with this utter pervert. But he\u2019s still in business in Italy and scheming to return to power, and he has guys in his court. But the American problem here, of Trumpism or whatever, is not unique to the US. On the contrary, Britain, which is normally the sane guy in the room has extremely weird politics right now: Scotland is running away, the Bernie Sanders-figure who took over the Left can only talk about breaking free from Europe and there\u2019s no particular reason for them to do that at all, real estate in the capital city is totally out of control, nothing is working. These are normally the people who people ask advice from, Mother of Parliaments, can you come in and show us how to set up your legal system,\u2019cause everything\u2019s broken, the Mayor of London is a lunatic. They have it. The French have it. It\u2019s very bad in France. Italy is sort of okay, but only by Italian standards, Russian politics is very weird right now, it\u2019s kind of Putin and nobody else, he doesn\u2019t know what he\u2019s doing and he\u2019s kind of being led by the nose by these weird Ukrainian rebels very like the Fiume thing. They talk about Fiume all the time. All the guys in the Ukraine are big D\u2019Annunzio fans. Fascism is on the rise; there\u2019s a lot of nativist parties all over. And all the global things breaking down–nobody\u2019s going to pass the Pacific Trade Agreement; nobody wants it: the Right doesn\u2019t want it; the Left doesn\u2019t want it. The Euro might break up. We\u2019re just passing into an era of considerable political discord, which is typical of a large-scale economic depression that people can\u2019t get out of. People have just lost faith in their system, and not just in the US, all over the place. There\u2019s just nobody who\u2019s on top of their game. Maybe Canada, but Canada was crazy until a couple of months ago. They were really eccentric. So, it\u2019s a situation that really doesn\u2019t have words for it, and the people who would normally be describing what\u2019s going on are really at sixes and sevens; they just literally don\u2019t know what to say. If you go back and read some press coverage of, say, the American presidential election, it\u2019s got a lot of coverage and absolutely nobody has any idea what\u2019s going to happen. Twitter exchanges just turn out to be blisteringly detached from reality, and just, like, looking for weapons of mass destruction that just plain aren\u2019t there; shock and awe that nobody is shocked by or awed by–weird, crazy shit, and it’s getting worse. Now they\u2019re shell-shocked. Nobody wants to say anything about anything. The only thing that’s kind of good about it, historically speaking, is that the level of violence is really, really low, except in Moslem countries, where they\u2019re busy killing each other. They don\u2019t even kill the West very much. You would think from the violence of the rhetoric that everybody would be out tear-gassing each other, but you\u2019ve got stuff like a guy grabbed a reporter\u2019s arm at a rally and maybe left a few bruises, and it\u2019s as if a nuclear weapon had been detonated. There\u2019s no political violence. There\u2019s lots of personal violence. Every week there\u2019s a massacre by some schizophrenic who just cuts loose with an automatic weapon, but there\u2019s no political violence at all, seriously, any. There\u2019s police killing black people, but there\u2019s no riots, no Watts, no smashing, grabbing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"By<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

RICK: There\u2019s certainly no rioting in the streets, killing people.<\/strong><\/p>\n

BRUCE<\/span>: No assassinations. The universities, which are usually super-violent in times of political unrest are sort of like people cowering in safe spaces. They\u2019re locking the doors and staying inside and kind of crying quietly into a handkerchief. It\u2019s a very strange epoch, but not super scary. There\u2019s no purges, the wars aren\u2019t much of a war. Now, the Ukrainian war is kind of serious, but it\u2019s one of the worst wars I\u2019ve ever seen just in terms of the inability of the guys fighting it to know anything about a war. They\u2019re like motorcycle gangs with missiles: \u201cLet\u2019s shoot a Dutch airliner out of the sky!\u201d \u201cWhy? Did you check the code to see if it was a civilian?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t know, I just saw it and blew it away!\u201d Terrible. Really just a terrible military. It\u2019s a joke how bad they are.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"tumblr_inline_o9hkfmflmh1s0669x_1280\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

RICK: There\u2019s been a lot of people thinking that the rhetoric is going to lead to violence.<\/strong><\/p>\n

BRUCE<\/span>: It should have done lead to it a long time ago. America has a very rough and tumble style of politics. The ideological polarization is complete. People say Hillary Clinton is unelectable because everybody on the Right really hates her and her unfavorables are sky high, but there\u2019s nobody on the Left who has any favorables with anybody on the Right. They hate Sanders more than they hate her, and he wasn\u2019t even a Democrat. Anybody who even looks like a leader on the left is immediately totaled. There\u2019s nobody they\u2019d agree with at all. They don\u2019t like any standard leftist, not that there are many left. I mean, it might as well be her, because there\u2019s no other candidate who isn\u2019t just as detested, or wouldn\u2019t be immediately. She\u2019s been around for a zillion years. She might still lose the primaries; she\u2019s not a very charismatic campaigner. And it\u2019s a pity she\u2019s kind of the Ma Ferguson of US politics, but at least she\u2019s not running around with an armed militia having people lined up and shot. She\u2019s not liquidating people and it\u2019s not, in of fact, a particularly violent thing, and that\u2019s what\u2019s historically puzzling to me about it. You would think, looking at the history of the past 120 years that if people were really this badly off that there would just be lots of rioting. What happened to them? Are they all in jail?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"tumblr_inline_o9hkf4q99k1s0669x_1280\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

RICK: Especially as armed as we are now.<\/strong><\/p>\n

BRUCE<\/span>: I actually just suspect that they\u2019re spending all their time typing on screens. They\u2019re literally just too busy to go burn anything. They\u2019d rather be on Facebook.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The interview is but one of the bonus goodies in the inexpensive $19.95 hardback. The legendary\u00a0Warren Ellis<\/a>\u00a0of comics and novel fame\u00a0offered up the introduction. The extraordinary Christopher Brown<\/a>, whose debut\u00a0novel\u00a0Tropic of Kansas<\/em> is coming out 2017, delivered the\u00a0insightful afterword. And finally, the incredible John Coulthart<\/a> supplied the gorgeous cover, interior illustrations, interior design, and design notes, making for a truly incredible looking volume.<\/p>\n

This all serves as a prelude to\u00a0Bruce’s fine writing, which is of course the centerpiece of the book. The story is getting all sorts of positive buzz.<\/p>\n

[STARRED REVIEW]<\/strong> \u201cNoted sci-fi maven and futurologist Sterling (Love Is Strange, 2012, etc.) takes a side turn in the slipstream in this offbeat, sometimes-puzzling work of dieselpunk-y alternative history. Resident in Turin, hometown of Calvino, for a dozen years, Sterling has long been experimenting with what the Italians call fantascienza, a mashup of history and speculation that\u2019s not quite science fiction but is kin to it. Take, for example, the fact that Harry Houdini once worked for the Secret Service, add to it the fact that H.P. Lovecraft once worked for Houdini, and ecco: why not posit Lovecraft as a particularly American kind of spook, \u201cnot that old-fashioned, cloak-and-dagger, European style of spy,\u201d who trundles out to Fiume to see what\u2019s what in the birthplace of Italian futurism-turned-fascism? Lovecraft is just one of the historical figures who flits across Sterling\u2019s pages, which bear suitably futuristic artwork, quite wonderful, by British illustrator John Coulthart. Among the others are Woodrow Wilson and Adolf Hitler, to say nothing of Gabriele D\u2019Annunzio and Benito Mussolini. \u201cSeen from upstream, most previous times seem mad,\u201d notes graphic novelist Warren Ellis in a brief introduction, but the Futurist project seems particularly nutty from this distance; personified by Lorenzo Secondari, a veteran of World War I who leads the outlaw coalition called the Strike of the Hand Committee in the \u201cpirate utopia\u201d of the soi disant Republic of Carnaro, its first task is to build some torpedoes and then turn them into \u201cradio-controlled, airborne Futurist torpedoes,\u201d not the easiest thing considering the technological limitations of the time. A leader of the \u201cDesperates,\u201d who \u201ccame from anywhere where life was hard, but honor was still bright,\u201d Secondari and The Prophet\u2014D\u2019Annunzio, that is\u2014recognize no such limitations and discard anything that doesn\u2019t push toward the future. So why not a flying pontoon boat with which to sail off to Chicago, and why not a partnership with Houdini to combat world communism? A kind of Ragtime for our time: provocative, exotic, and very entertaining.\u201d
\n\u2014Kirkus<\/a><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Look for\u00a0Pirate Utopia<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>this November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in April on the eve of\u00a0the annual SXSW Interactive Festival, I met with Bruce Sterling for an interview that’ll be in the\u00a0forthcoming Pirate Utopia. While roughly 90% of the original discussion\u00a0made it’s way into the finished book (due out … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,26],"tags":[61,217,219,222,220,214,218,215,221,83,87,216],"class_list":["post-4105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-interviews","tag-bruce-sterling","tag-christopher-brown","tag-donal-trump","tag-fiume","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-interview","tag-john-coulthart","tag-pirate-utopia","tag-presidential-election","tag-science-fiction","tag-tachyon-publications","tag-warren-ellis"],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n