You may have noticed on the title page that this is billed as issue #9 of A WORD IN EDGEWISE. Yes, there were previous issues, but if you missed any between June, 1971 and now, don't fret. There weren't any.
So what's a quarter century among friends?
I never did describe this as more than a "semi-occasional" outburst; it just got to be more "semi" than I ever imagined.
It started when I purchased a big old A.B. Dick mimeograph, built like a tank. (It followed the family from Poughkeepsie to Chicago, and then to White Plains, where it held down the basement until 1989.) The technology involved blue stencils, into which one's typwriter cut holes for the ink to ooze through. It was motorized, so that after cranking through a few copies by hand to wipe off excess ink, one could send through a run of 200 in a reasonably short time (unless static fouled up the paper transport).
The last four issues serialized a single article, "I have a Pipedream", which I wrote in advance, so that the issues could emerge on a tight schedule. I don't think any issue exceeded 200 copies, but the "pipedream" series made a disproportionate splash. It sketched a magnificent human future which I hoped would emerge from trends in robotics, artificial intelligence, biological engineering, and the space frontier. I sent it to a number of the leading workers in those fields, and some of them made copies for their classes, or posted it on bulletin boards. Soon I was receiving mail from readers to whom I'd never sent it. Oh, happy days! Years later, it won me a cameo appearance in a real live book (Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition. by Ed Regis), which you can still find in your book store. The best of it is, after 26 years, there's very little of the pipedream I would want to revise!
The earlier issues might require more review. They dealt with political and economic matters, and my ideas have evolved a great deal over the years.
So what has brought it back to life? Think Internet and think retirement! It was postage that always limited the circulation, while making a living limited my time and energy for writing. Now I'm retired, and a single copy posted to my web pages can potentially reach the whole world. I'll still run off some paper copies on my computer printer, but that's just for sending to people whom I suspect of spending their time elsewhere than on the Internet. We can't all be computer nerds.
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