She Walked On, Comforted By

I've Gone To Big Stadium Rock Concerts At Some Artist's Invitation, And There's This Invariable, Fascinating And Rather Sad Situation Of Concentric Circles Of Availability. There Are Green Rooms Within Green Rooms Literally Within Green Rooms. There Are Seven Or Eight Degrees Of Exclusivity, And Within Each Circle Of Exclusivity, Everyone Is So Happy To Be There, And They Don't Know That The Next Level Exists.

Dreaming In Public Is An Important Part Of Our Job Description, As Science Writers, But There Are Bad Dreams As Well As Good Dreams. We're Dreamers, You See, But We're Also Realists, Of A Sort.

My Dream Scenario Would Be That You Could Go Into A Bookshop, Examine Copies Of Every Book In Print That They're Able To Offer, Then For A Fee Have Them Produce In A Minute Or Two A Beautiful Finished Copy In A Dust Jacket That You Would Pay For And Take Home.

A Snappy Label And A Manifesto Would Have Been Two Of The Very Last Things On My Own Career Want List. That Label Enabled Mainstream Science Fiction To Safely Assimilate Our Dissident Influence, Such As It Was. Cyberpunk Could Then Be Embraced And Given Prizes And Patted On The Head, And Genre Science Fiction Could Continue Unchanged.

Twitter Is The Only Brand Of Social Media That I Have Ever Taken To At All. I Like The Feeling Of Having My Perception Of The World Expanded Daily, 24/7, By Being Able To Monitor The Reactions Of 100-and-some People Throughout The World That I Personally Follow So I Have Some Sense Of Who They Are. There Has Never Really Been Anything Like That Before, At Least In Terms Of The Digestible 140-character Bandwidth That Twitter Is Based On. I Am Able To Wake Up, Open Twitter, And Sort Of Glance Across The Psychic State Of The Planet.