Cleantech Friday by Steve Guengerich

I have to admit:  I’m a big Bruce Sterling fan.  As a certifiably “famous” science fiction writer – counting as yet another of the partially-resident celebrities that Austin loves to claim as its own – Sterling has always struck me as among those folks like David Bowie’s character in the wonderfully creepy movie “The Man Who Fell to Earth” …someone not quite fitting in with the present times.

For years, I have been making my annual pilgrimage to SXSW Interactive, whether or not I was a speaker that year, to hear Sterling’s rant, like his legendary 2006 talk, when he struggled to a close with a passionate, desparate, inspirational reading of Carl Sandburg’s “the People.”

What’s this got to do with cleantech?  Little did I know that over a decade ago when I picked up Sterling’s book “Heavy Weather” on a whim, that I would be reading the work of a living oracle of Katrina, climate change, and other global symptoms that Al Gore used so effectively in his Academy-Award winning powerpoint, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and that have served so well as catalysts for cleantech entrepreneurialism.

And, little could I have imagined that – a decade after reading “Heavy Weather” – I’d be sitting down for lunch at Castle Hill across from the man himself, talking about how we would close the 1st annual Clean Energy Technology Venture Summit with our panel (joined by Matthew Nordan of Lux Research)  entitled “The Science Versus Science Fiction of Cleantech.”

In Sterling’s own irascible way, he was pleased to “have lived this long to see” such an event in his hometown and prehaps, in his own way, left feeling a little less like someone who fell to earth and more like someone who belongs. 

If you want to keep track of Bruce’s other design, cleantech, and global socio-political, economic rants, then watch for updates on the Veridian Design Movement blog.  See you next week.

Sphere: Related Content

Filed under: CleanTech