Bruce Sterling (www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/) lives in Belgrade, Serbia, with his wife, Serbian author and filmmaker Jasmina Tesanovic. He has recently reinvented himself as a futurist and design critic, publishing Shaping Things (2005), “a book about created objects,” as a Media-works pamphlet, through MIT press. One of the chief architects of cyberpunk science fiction, he has published ten novels and three story collections to date. 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.
“Ivory Tower” was published in Nature. It is a full scale attack on scientism using deadpan humor. Following Jonathan Swift (see the McIntyre story, earlier) in his attack on the Royal Society, the premier body of scientists of his day, in the flying island of Laputa section of Gulliver’s Travels, Sterling mounts his own attack: 10,000 self-educated physicists form a commune.