Robot Artists and Black Swans

Advance Praise for Robot Artists & Black Swans

“Sterling’s latest collection is rich and wide, a cross between Primo Levi and Jorge Luis Borges—with a touch of Phil Dick and Bill Gibson. I love it.”
—Greg Bear, author of The Unfinished Land

“Sterling is a visionary, equally at home writing about the future as he is of the past, and his inspired prose continues to provoke and satisfy. For his latest foray in storytelling, Sterling adopts the Italian persona, Bruno Argento, ‘an unlikely “cyber-punk” Texan who somehow decides to become Turinese,’ in order to mine the treasures of his adoptive country in this series of fantastic (or fantascienza) stories. As Argento, Sterling embraces his new identity wholeheartedly, evoking such former denizens of the locale as Italo Calvino, Primo Levi (who wrote sf under the moniker Damiano Malabaila), even Friedrich Nietzche (who resided there while madness overtook him). In the titular ‘Black Swan,’ a tech blogger follows a suave industrial spy across multiple Turins, each one on a different trajectory—watch for cameos from Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni. The robot artist of the title appears in ‘Robot in Roses,’ in which an art critic accompanies (and attempts to explain) The Winkler, a robot in the form of a wheelchair, as it navigates the ruins of a radioactive future Rome. Sharp, witty, erudite dialogue keeps the stories moving along.”
—Booklist

“Imagine an American science fiction writer from Texas, transplanted to Italy, now writing in the voice of an Italian alter ego, and you might have a sense of the gonzo delights inhabiting Bruce Sterling’s Robot Artists and Black Swans.”
—Washington Post

“It's all here, this time with an Italian flavor: the inventive tech, the meticulously detailed futures, the stylish and sardonic prose, the creative adjectival combinations. Set in Turin, Rome, and an upgraded Hell (Italian designers are good), these stories could only have been written by Bruce Sterling. Treat yourself to one of the most original voices in science fiction.”
—Nancy Kress, author of After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

“Bruce Sterling ‘literally’ takes you to Hell and back and back in this sprawling, delirious tour of an Italy jarred just slightly off-kilter, parallel universe, nineteenth-century terrorists and bicephalous recluses, cigar-smoking mummies and wandering performance artists who happen to be wheelchairs.”
—Peter Watts, author of The Freeze-Frame Revolution

"Bruce Sterling’s Italian short fiction is like an Asti Spumante from the vineyard where futurism was first fermented.”
—Charles Stross, author of the Merchant Princes Series

“A delightful mix of high fantasy and futuristic speculation featuring royalty, noblemen, bandits, and other scoundrels.”
—Kirkus

“Sterling’s clever, compassionate work will appeal to fans of intelligent cyberpunk.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Utterly unlike Sterling and unmistakably the work of Sterling: Robot Artists & Black Swans is a sardonic, madcap tour through the grand passions and strange centuries of Italian sf.”
—Cory Doctorow, author of Walkaway

“Full of clever and original lateral-thinking insights into society and the universe, still rife with outsider characters and streetwise scenario . . . [a] thoroughly entertaining collection of nimble and bright tales.”
—Locus

“Bruno Argento is the Calvino of the Cyberpunks, and in this new collection Bruce Sterling channels his Turinese alter ego to conjure dark and wondrous visions of alternate Europes past, present and future. A perfectly curated selection of the best recent works from a living master of short form SF, Robot Artists & Black Swans shows what can be achieved when a writer fully embraces the possibilities of becoming a character in one of his own stories.”
—Christopher Brown, author of Tropic of Kansas

“Sterling emerges as an Italian cultural figure, within hailing distance of Italo Calvino and Federico Fellini.”
—Rudy Rucker, author of The Hacker and the Ants

“Playfully spanning a range of genres, modes and ideas, the Bruno Argento stories show one of the great science fictional minds at work, processing exciting new ideas in a novel context and reaching towards an increasingly uncertain future . . . Both ‘Robot In Roses’ and ‘Black Swan’ are powerful examples of Sterling at his best, and are reason enough on their own to make the collection essential reading.”
—Fantasy Hive

—Review copy mailings to leading newspaper, magazine, and fiction reviewers, and specialty science-fiction-oriented outlets such as Nature, Wired, and Ars Technica
—Digital ARCs available via NetGalley, Edelweiss, and Goodreads; additional print available upon request
—Online promotional rollout to include coverage in the U.S. and Italy, via blog tour, interviews, radio, and podcasts
—Social media push by the author and publisher via Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / Goodreads
—Author appearances at bookstores, trade shows, genre-themed conventions, and virtual events TBD