After several hours of research, netlinking with an ancient Cyberdine
Lynx deck, Drifter quits his work for a while and looks around the chatsubo.

    "You know," he says, in a firm tone of voice, as if to gain attention,
"Something I said earlier makes me think." He moves his chair back and crosses
his left leg over to his right, surprisingly easy for a man so portly. "We
all got out influences in writing, eh? I mean, you don't write if you don't
read."
    "Sure you do," someone says, a bedraggled looking student with three
hundred text books piled up around him.
    "Er... right. Well, I'm talking about writing fiction, buck." Drifter looks
around the Chatsubo again, noting the regulars by both their absence and their
presence.
    "What I'm thinking is... What kind of writers, or what specific ones,
influenced our individual writings?"
    Drifter rotates his head to stretch the bones and ligaments in his neck
with silent popping noises. "Take me for instance. I read Robert A. Heinlein
when I was a kid, but got jaded. I read Theodore Sturgeon and know that his
stories have effected the way I *think*." Drifter pauses for a few moments to
think. "I've read a *lot* of short stories. More than I have novels. I'm
amazed at how much of the short fiction out there is SF or fantasy. I can't
even remember half the authors I've read. 'E For Effort', you know, the guy who
wrote that barely got published at all..." Drifter looks melancholy. "When i
first read Neuromancer, I had never HEARD of Cyberpunk. So it was a major
shock, yknow? Cause it was so much like how I thought and wanted to be able to
do things." He fingers the dull glint of his skull socket carefully. "This. I
want one of these for my REAL body. I'd probably sell my life away to get into
the world that has this." He shrugs. "Anyways, I read a lot of other stuff like
that I could find. Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick, Laidlaw, Shiner, Shirley,
whatever I found."
  Drifter scratches at his scruffy little beard furiously for a second. "It's
funny.. I can't get into the older stuff as much. I'm always painfully aware of
how wrong the guys in the 40's and 50's and 60's were about our future... I
dont' really think about the 70's much." he nods to himself at some hidden
chain of thoughts.

  "So... Anyone else got the guts to show who, or what, influenced them?" He
smiles that unnerving smile again. "Don't be afraid to reply either. I don't
give a moose's flying balls if someone wants to talk this way, or any other
way."
                                                                               
  After all, that is just one form of communication. Maybe it's hard for some
to use, or maybe some lurkers are intimidated by what they read... But none of
us our professionals. I'm certainly not...


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  |                       Drifter... Homo Postmortemus                       |
  | ObLyric: The wind kissed him goodbye... and then he died. --Judas Priest |
  | ObQuote: "Claire's eyebrows tried to migrate to the back of her neck."   |
  | ObWeird: "Areoffsthereareandaretherechipschipsthereare!!" "Say what?!!"  |
  | Internet: snarler%oak.decnet@pine.circa.ufl   or  7%arms.uucp@ufl.edu    |
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