Interesting Bruce Sterling quotes taken from this interview

NG: There seems to be a division between your work up to the mid-Eighties--usually set off Earth or in the past--and your output since then, which concentrates on the near future and the socio-cultural realities engendered by the information revolution. Was this a deliberate change in direction? What motivated it?

BS: Mostly I had a lot more information, and rather less imagination. Thanks to the Web and my work in journalism, I have tremendously good research material now. I can't go to the moons of Jupiter, but if I hear of something odd going on in Turkish Cyprus, I can easily pull some strings and go to Turkish Cyprus. Compared to Ganymede, it's a remarkably engaging place: trees, buildings, food, heroin smugglers, genocidal war crimes, it's more fantastic than one might give it credit for. And you've got to keep in mind: I'm 46 years old. Rocketing flights of world-shattering fancy tend to be a young guy's game.