onal
publicity both for Jackson himself and the "cyberpunk" science fiction
writers generally.

Besides, science fiction people are used to being misinterpreted.
Science fiction is a colorful, disreputable, slipshod occupation, full
of unlikely oddballs, which, of course, is why we like it. Weirdness
can be an occupational hazard in our field. People who wear Halloween
costumes are sometimes mistaken for monsters.

Once upon a time--back in 1939, in New York City--science fiction and
the U.S. Secret Service collided in a comic case of mistaken identity.
This weird incident involved a literary group quite famous in science
fiction, known as "the Futurians," whose membership included such
future genre greats as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, and Damon Knight.
The Futurians were every bit as offbeat and wacky as any of their
spiritual descendants, including the cyberpunks, and were given to
communal living, spontaneous group renditions of light opera, and
midnight fencing exhibitions on the lawn. The Futurians didn't have
bulletin board systems, but they did have the technological equivalent
in 1939--mimeographs and a private printing press. These were in
steady use, producing a stream of science-fiction fan magazines,
literary manifestos, and weird articles, which were picked up in
ink-sticky bundles by a succession of strange, gangly, spotty young men
in fedoras and overcoats.

The neighbors grew alarmed at the antics of the Futurians and reported
them to the Secret Service as suspected counterfeiters. In the winter
of 1939, a squad of USSS agents with drawn guns burst into "Futurian
House," prepared to confiscate the forged currency and illicit printing
presses. There they discovered a slumbering science fiction fan named
George Hahn, a guest of the Futurian commune who had just arrived in
New York. George Hahn managed to explain himself and his group, and
the Secret Service agents left the Futurians in peace henceforth.
(Alas, Hahn died in 1991, just before I had discovered this astonishing
historical parallel, and just before I could interview him for this
book.)

But the Jackson case did not come to a swift and comic end. No quick
answers came his way, or mine; no swift reassurances that all was right
in the digital world, that matters were well in hand after all. Quite
the opposite. In my alternate role as a sometime pop-science
journalist, I interviewed Jackson and his staff for an article in a
Britis