Sterling

Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction writer whose work often revolves around memetics. In his stories and novels, he often uses the idea of warfare and struggle being fought not just over the paradigm of human existance but also by the paradigm. His series of Shaper/Mechanist stories collected in Crystal Express and his novel Schismatrix describe a far future in which the two offshoots of the human race (the Shapers, who engineer their genetic material, and the Mechanists, who replace their flesh with silicon) struggle not just with guns and money but with ideas. The winning side will be the one which evolves fastest. A similar theme is found in his near-future cyberpunk novel, Islands in the Net.