Certain persons who know what they are talking about where publishing is concerned have assured me that I have reached the stage in my life and career where it is not only possible, but advisable, to release a compilation of what are drolly referred to as my “shorter” works. You are reading its introduction, which I’ll try to make especially short.
Two general approaches could be taken to editing such a volume. One would be to make of it a pitilessly accurate historical record and trust the reader to make allowances for the widely varying levels of maturity, self-regard, and financial desperation that might have figured into the author’s motives while the component pieces were being produced. That might have been an interesting strategy twenty years ago, but now we have the Internet for that.
The second approach, of course, is to conduct a shameless whitewashing of that historical record, picking only the good stuff, and editing even that to make it look better. This, within reason, is what I have done here. Which is not to say that these pieces don’t contain material that might strike the sophisticated reader as dated or jejune; a bit of that has been left in because it makes me feel young. I have, however, removed some material that must have been topical when I wrote it but now seems merely inexplicable. As an example, the Slashdot interview, the second piece in the book, contains some answers that develop into essays that seem about as worth reading today as they ever were, while others were of interest only to that website’s clientele (lovely people, but they know how to find the original if they really want to reread it) eight years ago. The latter have been removed. I have made similar edits to some of the other stories.
As has been pointed out by some critics, writing short fiction is not my strong point, but I have published a small number of short stories in my day. Two of these, “Spew” and “The Great Simoleon Caper,” made the cut. A third, “Jipi and the Paranoid Chip,” seemed extraordinarily ponderous and labored upon rereading and so has been left out.
During the mid-1990s I produced two very long pieces of what might generously be defined as journalism for WIRED magazine. The second of these, “Mother Earth, Mother Board,” has not aged too badly and has been included intact. The first, “In the Kingdom of Mao Bell,” was not as good to begin with and has gotten worse since, as many of the remarks that, at the time, I thought of as insights have now either become bromides or simply been proven wrong. For all that, it does have a few decent anecdotal bits, and so what you will find in this volume is a heavily cut-down series of excerpts.
Finally, the book contains two original, previously unpublished pieces: an essay about sitting entitled “Arsebestos,” and a one-sentence work of fiction, unfinished, and, for very sound artistic and legal reasons, never to be finished, which I will allow the reader to discover in due course.
It only remains for me to thank the people who helped these pieces come into being: as always, my supernaturally patient and understanding wife, and my agent, Liz Darhansoff, who has been a fount of infallible advice for thirty years; Kevin Kelly at WIRED, who talked me past my initial skepticism that an article about cables could ever be any good and turned a blind eye to some rather odd expense reports; the readers/members of Slashdot; the Royal Society and Gresham College for inviting me to take part in forums where I would never have expected to find myself in any capacity above the level of bootblack; and the editorial page staff of the New York Times for randomly entering my life every few years and asking me to write short pieces on odd topics.