One Should Never Mistake Pattern For Meaning.

I Think The Future Stopped Looking American When You Think Back To Blade Runner And Neuromancer, When It Started To Look More Japanese.

It Was A Truism That All Civilizations Were Basically Neurotic Until They Made Contact With Everybody Else And Found Their Place Within The Ever-changing Meta-civilisation Of Other Beings, Because, Until Then, During The Stage When They Honestly Believed They Might Be Entirely Alone In Existence, All Solo Societies Were Possessed Of Both An Inflated Sense Of Their Own Importance And A Kind Of Existential Terror At The Sheer Scale And Apparent Emptiness Of The Universe.

Any Theory Which Causes Solipsism To Seem Just As Likely An Explanation For The Phenomena It Seeks To Describe Ought To Be Held In The Utmost Suspicion.

Look At These Humans! How Could Such Glacial Slowness Even Be Called Life? An Age Could Pass, Virtual Empires Rise And Fall In The Time They Took To Open Their Mouths To Utter Some New Inanity!

Stories Set In The Culture In Which Things Went Wrong Tended To Start With Humans Losing Or Forgetting Or Deliberately Leaving Behind Their Terminal. It Was A Conventional Opening, The Equivalent Of Straying Off The Path In The Wild Woods In One Age, Or A Car Breaking Down At Night On A Lonely Road In Another.