2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA]

I own a *lot* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in
storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY
LADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade:
the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today.
Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears
from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science
fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]

Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers
are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way
that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are
malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many
months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of
durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED
BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book
into something that could be simply run off a press in a few
minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than
exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg
press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of
the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than
picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge
variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from
person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]

Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of
speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties
and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is
to lay out both categories of ideas.