Bruce Sterling’s Other Evil Twin

Austin skiffy fans with long memories may remember that I won the Bruce Sterling Rant Off at an Armadillocon lo these many years ago. This means that I am authorized to act as a Low Calorie Bruce Sterling Substitute, should the need arise.

What you may not know is that Bruce Sterling has another evil twin, or at least one Sandeep Gupta, who blatantly plagiarized the text of Bruce’s book The Hacker Crackdown and republished it as Hacking in the Computer World.

And for those that didn’t know it, Bruce released the entire book as literary freeware back in 1994, a copy of which can be found here.

Sayeth Bruce: “This is awesome! I always wanted to be a globally-aware Indian-writing-in-English. Me and Rushdie, man! From now on I’m gonna be ‘Sandeep Gupta’ whenever I please!”

By Lawrence Person

Lawrence Person is a science fiction writer living in Austin, Texas. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Analog, Postscripts, Jim Baen's Universe, Fear, and several anthologies. He also edits the Hugo-nominated SF critical magazine Nova Express, and runs the Turkey City Writer's Workshop. His non-fiction has appeared in National Review, Reason, Whole Earth Review, The Freeman, The World & I, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and Slashdot.org. He owns such a large library (mostly science fiction first editions) he had to buy a two-story house to put it in, and then adopted a golden retriever to drag him out of his house on a regular basis. He also makes a mean batch of salsa.

1 comment

  1. Someone tried to do that to Atlanta Nights recently. Eternal vigilance is the price of irony sometimes….

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