(FORTUNE Magazine) – Bruce Sterling, sci-fi author, editor, and technology critic, helped define the cyberpunk movement through books like Islands in the Net, Mirrorshades, and A Good Old-Fashioned Future. His next book, Tomorrow Now, is a critique of the future.

Q: What's your favorite gizmo?

A: To be treated with rigor, the definition of a gizmo has to be made distinct from machines and tools. A gizmo is a small, faddish, buzzy machine with a brief life span. A true gizmo has ridiculous amounts of functionality and has to have more features than you would ever learn before you throw it away. And you will throw it away, because the rate of obsolescence is incredibly fast. Moore's law kills anything with a chip in it. So any chip-based thing is a gizmo.

Q: The PC is a gizmo?

A: The ultimate. It's both amazingly powerful and amazingly temporary; everything it touches takes on gizmosity.

Then there's my poison-green Apple iMac computer, which is also a blobject. Blobjects are computer-modeled objects manufactured out of injection-molded plastic, or blown goo. Some gizmos are blobjects. Most blobjects are gizmos. The Microsoft Explorer Mouse is a blobject. The Cross Morph Pen has malleable blob that forms itself to your fingers.

Q: What's your favorite blobject?

A: The Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush, designed by a California company called Lunar Design. It's so far beyond normal toothbrushes that it's stunning that the world has waited this long for it to be invented. It's a truly 21st-century object, and it puts other toothbrushes to shame. The bristles are weird, the angles are weird, the handle is weird, and it's also about 15% better at removing stuff from your teeth. Now, a toothbrush may seem like a minor technological achievement compared to Hoover Dam or the Apollo V gantry, but people use them every day, for one of the most intimate things, brushing the inside of your oral cavity.

Q: How about tools?

A: The things I actually carry with me are items like my Swiss Army knife, the Craftsman model. I was at a hacker conference recently, and a guy called out, "Pocket tool check!" Out came the Swiss Army knives. It's a great hacker tool, with all those arcane little things like pliers, a leather punch, and tweezers. It has a galaxy of potential and is perfect when you have to hack together a swift, cheap kludge. Given enough time, you can break out of prison with a Swiss Army knife.