War & Peace Quote by Bruce Sterling

Sterling is doing what good cyberpunk always does: yanking the reader out of the comforting museum diorama of "real war" and into the messy, deniable present. The line pivots on a nasty little bureaucratic magic trick. Acts that would once be filed under insanity get reclassified as "war" the moment they succeed. Not because their nature changes, but because the state needs a legible category to justify response, budgets, and retaliation. "War" becomes less a description than a permission slip.

The bite is in the second sentence's shrug: they'll be called war too. That "too" quietly collapses distinctions between bombs, hacks, targeted assassinations, infrastructure sabotage, propaganda campaigns, and economic strangulation. Sterling is pointing at a world where violence migrates from uniforms and front lines to systems and networks, where the battlefield is power grids, supply chains, hospitals, public trust. The madman framing is crucial: it suggests how institutions protect their own myths by treating novel forms of aggression as aberrations - until repetition forces normalization.

Then he lands the paradox: "there will still be no conventional war". It's not pacifism; it's a warning about semantics lagging behind reality. We may keep saying "war" to soothe ourselves with an old script (declared enemies, clear victories, clean endings), while living in permanent conflict without the rituals that once contained it. Sterling's intent is diagnostic and cynical: the future doesn't abolish war; it abolishes the clarity that made war feel comprehensible.