#2 The Spearhead of Cognition 
"For Lem, science fiction is a documented form of thought-experiment: a spearhead of cognition... This is truly 'a literature of ideas,' dismissing the heart as trivial, but piercing the skull like an ice-pick."

#3 Updike's Version
"John Updike has got to be the epitome of everything that SF readers love to hate. Those slim, clever, etiolated mainstream novels about well-to-do New Yorker subscribers, who sip white wine and contemplate adultery..."

#4 The Agberg Ideology
"To speak with precision about the fantastic is like loading mercury with a pitchfork. Yet some are driven to confront this challenge. On occasion, a veteran SF writer will seriously and directly discuss the craft of writing science fiction."

#5 Slipstream
"...A kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility."

#6 Shinkansen
"This is a Japan which can no longer be tidily filed away under I for Inscrutable by a WestCiv Establishment with the self-appointed task of ordering the world. Japan today is an intensely globalized society with sky-high literacy, very low crime, excellent life-expectancy, tremendous fashion-sense, and a staggering amount of the electronic substance we used to call cash."

#7 My Rihla
"Sometimes known as 'the Marco Polo of Islam,' Ibn Battuta claimed to have traveled some seventy thousand miles during the years 1325-1354, visiting China, Arabia, India, Ghana, Constantinople, the Maldive Islands, Indonesia, Anatolia, Persia, Iraq, Sicily, Zanzibar... on foot, mind you, or in camel caravans, or in flimsy medieval Arab dhows, sailing the monsoon trade winds."

#9 Digital Dolphins In The Dance Of Biz
"In the, well, 'cultural logic of postmodern capitalism,' all our art wants to be digital now. First, so you can have it. Replicate it. Reproduce it, without loss of fidelity. And, second -- and this is the hidden agenda -- so you can throw it away. And never have to look at it again."

#10 A Statement Of Principle
"It has not escaped my attention that there are many people who believe that anyone called a 'cyberpunk' must be, almost by definition, entirely devoid of principle."

#11 Sneaking For Jesus 2001
"Conspiracy is for losers. As conspiracy freaks, by our very nature we'll always live on the outside of where it's Really Happening. That's what justifies our existence and allows us to tell Ourselves apart from Them."

#12 Return to the Rue Jules Verne
"The Paris Bohemians were the first genuine industrial-scale counterculture. This was the culture that created Jules Verne. It deserves a great deal of the credit or blame for origination of the genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. It has a legitimate claim on our attention and our loyalties."

#13 Electronic Text
"I now spend about as much time reading -- or perhaps 'scrolling' is the proper term -- e-zines as I do reading printed magazines. I've become dependent on e-zines. I scarcely see how I got along in life before electronically subscribing to Computer Underground Digest."

#14 Memories of the Space Age
"Is there still real life in science fiction, or is the aging cadre of veterans merely going through the motions, hoping for miracles? What exactly is the role of 'wonder' in a society where cosmic exploration is a matter of cash on the barrelhead?"