Shelfies #25: Bruce Sterling

I happen to be in Ibiza this week, so this is the shelfie-pic of the assorted Ibiziana.

I make no big claims for the merit of my collection. These are the Ibizan books that somehow drifted through the Ibizan door.

There's a long history of weirdo hippie dropout writers who wax mystical and lyrical about Ibiza, and although I'm one of that long chain of those scribbling visitors, I don't do that. During most of their very long sojourn here, the island locals never understood that they were mystical or pretty. They scraped up salt for a living. They were fishermen, shepherds and dirt-poor part-time pirates. They lived in starkly justifiable terror of being raided and enslaved by alien corsairs.

The Ibizan literary tradition is mostly eccentric histories written by odd Catholic priests, and also some Catalan poetry. It's cool that their Catalan poetry is such a living tradition for them, because in most other, larger languages, the poets are so crushed-down and cast-aside that even science-fiction writers  seem like towering mainstream-figures by comparison. But I'm not a poet. So I don't elbow my way into their scene. I just read some poetry sometimes.

You might notice some cookbooks. I'm the resident Ibizan-cuisine cook in my family.  None of us variant emigres are native Ibizans, but we're by no means "tourists," either.  We're likely best-described as technically-skilled European functionaries in the intra-EU travel industry. We're settled-in, we're suntanned. We dress, eat and act much like Ibizans. Ibizans never glance twice at us. We are frequently asked for directions by hapless day-trippers from Barcelona or Valencia.

I rarely write about Ibiza or Balearic issues. There's an industrial undercurrent to the island that interests me. I appreciate their extensive light-manufacturing and their specialized craft-tourist retail. I tend to haunt their design galleries, their material-culture museums and their hotel-construction supply-stores. I repair, make and hack stuff on the island. Ibiza is a kitchen and a tinkering-shed for me. It's like some bamboo-and-driftwood Bruce Sterling makerspace.

I learn a lot here, but not what people imagine Ibiza might teach you. I do know about their famous Balearic DJs, but those in-and-out musical-contractors are not Ibizans any more than I am. They're the fading aristocracy of an aging psychedelic culture-industry, who are slowly being eclipsed by the Ibizan urge to become an oligarch yacht-harbor. 

Ibizans who do well for themselves tend to depart from Ibiza. Their own offshored destinations are Argentina, where there's plenty of elbow room compared to their island, or Cuba, where their exchange-rate is great and everybody is impressed by their sophistication and keen to do whatever they say. That's the Ibizan victory-condition.  I'm all for that. I like to see them happy.

I do contemplate the Ibizans, and these books are part of my process of doing that, but my policy is to let them be. There are some places — Austin, Turin, Belgrade — where I'm a rather fierce cyberpunk cultural-imperialist, and I aggressively mess with people's heads. Ibiza doesn't need a lot of that from me, or from anyone else. Ibiza is a place you might plausibly go if the people around you were doing way way too MUCH of whatever-the-hell they were doing.  It's very otherwise, around here.

Bruce Sterling, author, journalist, editor, and critic, was born in 1954.  Best known for his ten science fiction novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews, design criticism,  opinion columns, and introductions for books ranging from Ernst Juenger to Jules Verne. His nonfiction works include The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, Shaping Things, and The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things. His most recent book is a fiction collection, Robot Artists and Black Swans: The Italian Fantascienza Stories.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. If you are interested in sharing a shelfie, please let us know.