This year, Trieste Science+Fiction will recognise Bruce Sterling’s career by awarding him the Premio Urania. Born in 1954, he is amongst the most important American science fiction authors, a scene that he has profoundly influenced and developed since the 80s. The standard setting in his books is the near future, but he also uses the present depicted in a realistic manner, although subtly altered by the our relationship to technology. He is famous for Mirrorshades, a collection of short science fiction stories published in 1986 that helped to define the cyberpunk subculture, and is a very shrewd in his understanding of advanced technology and new media. Amongst his greatest works are Schismatrix (1985), Islands in the Net (1988) and The Difference Engine (1990), which he wrote with William Gibson. This year he has released Utopia Pirata (published by Urania), another collection of short stories set in Italy, under the pseudonym Bruno Argento.
