It was a revelation when I first saw my text become electric vapor on the screen of a computer. I realized that I’d become part of a new generation in science fiction, a generation that had profound, genuine, "technical" advantages over all our predecessors. This freed me almost overnight from any sense that I still dwelt in the long shadows of Verne, Wells, or Stapledon. Those writers were titans of the imagination, but they were one and all confined to analog technologies of ink and woodpulp. Now I could do what I liked with words—bend them, break them, jam them together, pick them apart again. It was like patiently studying blues guitar and suddenly finding a fire-engine-red Fender Stratocaster.