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“Ain’t it the truth.”

Lyle nodded. “I’m in business, zude!”

“You gonna perfect that inertial whatsit?” Eddy said.

“Maybe. It could happen. I get to work on it a lot now. I’m getting closer, really getting a grip on the concept. It feels really good. It’s a good hack, man. It makes up for all the rest of it. It really does.”

Eddy sipped his mimosa. “Lyle.”

“What?”

“You didn’t hook up that settop box and look at it, did you?”

“You know me, Eddy,” Lyle said. “Just another kid with a wrench.”

Sterling to Kessel, 29 March 1985:

“You can’t turn pop genre into mainstream. You can’t turn rock and roll into modern symphonic music. It won’t wash.”

Kessel to Sterling, 2 April 1985:

‘“You can’t turn pop genre into mainstream.’ Maybe. I see the problem. But a lot of good stuff has been produced in the past by artists trying to do exactly that…. look at Shakespeare and revenge tragedy (Hamlet). Hammett and the hardboiled detective story (The Glass Key). Jane Austen and the romance (Persuasion). Conrad and the spy novel (The Secret Agent). Melville and the swindle story (The Confidence Man).”

Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland

(With apologies to E. R. Eddison)

Gwyneth Jones

The virtual reality stories that followed in the wake of 0CP’S first wave traded in the wonders of the digital alternative to reality, a world transcending the limitations of the flesh. Here Gwyneth Jones draws a sharp contrast between the lives of people in our world and their fantasy lives in the VR world.

In the process she performs an interrogation of the uses of fantasy. Like so much fantasy (and science fiction), VR offers the temptation of effortless sex, physical prowess, and costless adventure in a romanticized world without entropy. Can the virtual world escape the limitations of humanity?

The earth walls of the caravanserai rose strangely from the empty plain. She let the black stallion slow his pace. The silence of deep dusk had a taste, like a rich dark fruit; the air was keen. In the distance mountains etched a jagged margin against an indigo sky; snow-streaks glinting in the glimmer of the dawning stars. She had never been here before, in life. But as she led her horse through the gap in the high earthen banks she knew what she would see. The camping-booths around the walls; the beaten ground stained black by the ashes of countless cooking fires; the wattle-fenced enclosure where travellers’ riding beasts mingled indiscriminately with their host’s goats and chickens… the tumbledown gallery, where sheaves of russet plains-grass sprouted from empty window-spaces. Everything she looked on had the luminous intensity of a place often-visited in dreams.

She was a tall woman, dressed for riding in a kilt and harness of supple leather over brief close-fitting linen: a costume that left her sheeny, muscular limbs bare and outlined the taut, proud curves of breast and haunches. Her red hair was bound in a braid as thick as a man’s wrist. Her sword was slung on her back, the great brazen hilt standing above her shoulder. Other guests were gathered by an open-air kitchen, in the orange-red of firelight and the smoke of roasting meat. She returned their stares coolly: she was accustomed to attracting attention. But she didn’t like what she saw. The host of the caravanserai came scuttling from the group by the fire. His manner was fawning. But his eyes measured, with a thief’s sly expertise, the worth of the sword she bore and the quality of Lemiak’s harness. Sonja tossed him a few coins, and declined to join the company.

She had counted fifteen of them. They were poorly dressed and heavily armed. They were all friends together and their animals—both terror-birds and horses — were too good for any honest travellers’ purposes. Sonja had been told that this caravanserai was a safe halt. She judged that this was no longer true. She considered riding out again onto the plain. But wolves and wild terror-birds roamed at night between here and the mountains, at the end of winter. And there were