An emblematic thinker on the future, he has examined these issues in essays such as The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2003) and Shaping Things (2005). His work has been presented on ABC's Nightline, the BBC's The Late Show, CBC's Morningside, on MTV and TechTV and in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, Nature, I.D., Metropolis, Technology Review, Der Spiegel, La Stampa and La Repubblica.

From 2005 to 2013 Bruce Sterling was ‘Visionary in Residence’ at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, then at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, the Center for Science and the Imagination at the University of Arizona, and again as guest researcher at Pasadena in a project on augmented reality.

Bruce Sterling divides his time between Turin, Austin and Belgrade.