Bruce Sterling (www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/) lives usually in some exotic place in Europe, from which he continues his lifelong habit of cultural observation and commentary, now mostly online. In 2003 he became Professor of Internet studies and science fiction at the European Graduate School, where he teaches intensive Summer seminars. His most recent novel, his eleventh, is SF, The Caryatids (2009). His short fiction is collected in Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007). Throughout Sterling’s career, part of his project has been to put us in touch with the larger world in which we live, giving us glimpses of not only speculative and fantastic realities, but also the bedrock of politics in human behavior. He says, “Once I got my head around this idea that ’the future’ was bogus, I was able to mess around with a lot of invisible assumptions.” He is drawn to events and especially people tipping the present over into the future. His short fiction, now as likely to be fantasy as SF, is one of the finest bodies of work in the genre over the last three decades.
“The Master of the Aviary” is our second story choice from Welcome to the Greenhouse, a Gene Wolfean story of the far future that takes place after environmental catastrophe. It involves political intrigues and a scholar who thinks he’s done with that sort of thing. We think it has a fine last line.