WELCOME TO THE END of the second Millennium and the triumph of world capitalism. Heady times, these, especially for the global commodification machine, whose business might be summarized in the following principle: They will sell us everything we want, and we will want only what they sell us.
In the worldwide marketplace, the implementation of this principle has become ever more ruthless and efficient. Anyone who fails to observe the principle resolutely, or fails to devise the technically most efficient mechanisms for implementing it, falls and is eaten or has their flesh and bones ploughed under. The survivors celebrate their victories as metaphysical and ethical triumphs, proper outcomes of laudable processes: Social Darwinism (not natural selection but a vicious parody of it); or, more grandly, Election--God's tribute to their essential puissance and goodness.
As a consequence, in traditional publishing the means of production (to use a quaint term) have become centralized, while the means of distribution have become fewer and narrower. The publishers have become fewer in number and larger in size--all-absorbing blobs of capitalist protoplasm. The great marketing machines gear up to produce the new mega-seller by M. Crichton or S. King or J. Grisham or whoever else has shown that he or she can produce effective marketing templates, and the stacks of books arrive at Waldenbooks and B. Dalton and Borders and Barnes & Noble ... mega-seller from mega-publisher to mega-chain to eager consumer--step right this way, young and old, it's good for what ails you, and if this one doesn't quite do the job, we've got a bunch more very like it ...
It's all a bit of a nightmare, really, looked at this way, not a scenario to encourage the young writer--or the merely different one. In this version of reality, the consumer stands at the sliding glass door of the mall bookstore, waiting to snatch at that cardboard bin and put down 30% off the retail price on this week's bestseller. So we--the mega-publishers--don't have time to fuck around with you and your voice, your vision, your originality--give us a break: we need product, and we need it now.
However, in one of history's nice ironies, just at this moment of the global dream machine's triumph, it has delivered into our hands the tools with which to fight it. The military forged its networks to survive nuclear war and inadvertently engineered a great proving-ground for freedom, perhaps anarchy. Expensive, elite-produced and -owned technologies have devolved--economically speaking--into mere commodities, sold at cut-rate prices to the masses, and these include the tools of desktop publishing and distribution.
In short, it's not only the age of the publishing conglomerate but also the age of the 'zine and the ezine. A computer, some readily available software, an ink jet printer, some envelopes and stamps--a 'zine. Same setup, adding a modem and a bit more software and a net connection--an ftp site or gopher site, mailing list or Web page.
Power to the people, for better and for worse--that's the Net. It can be ugly, stupid, vulgar, venal, offensive; a font of misinformation, disinformation, straight lies, and rumors ...
The Net cannot be rationalized or made remotely sane, sanitary, and consistently "useful." As I reminded a friend of mine who was complaining about some recent enormity online, the Net is a medium for people, and whatever measured use it is intended for, someone will turn it to their own demented purposes: metaphorically speaking, from a route for intra-corporate memoranda into a medium for worshipping shoes. And no one is gatekeeping, censoring, or even bouncing drunks, lunatics, and assorted assholes.
And above and beyond this issue, there is the question of information overload, not the mere "information explosion" of the '60s, but a process more like a supernova. Any number of very bright and well-motivated people are trying to find technical solutions to this problem, and while I wish them joy, I don't believe they will succeed. Why? Because all technical means toward solving these problems become new instances of the problems themselves. To use merely the most salient example, the Web emerged as a hypertextual solution to several dilemmas inherent in the Net at the time: the available software was difficult to use, the available information widely scattered and disorganized, and so on-- but the Web then became the new arena of overload. Further, as bandwidth widens, software becomes more powerful, and access to the Net cheaper and more readily available, the result will be still more overload.
So with the tools we have been given (thanks, generals, admirals, and CEOs), we are overwhelming ourselves. "Mere anarchy," in Yeats's phrase, has certainly been loosed upon the world.
The only solutions I see are human ones. Until the advent of intelligent machines--which may be never--we must sort among the information presented on the Net and choose for our fellow beings what we find interesting and important, and we must present what we find so that our fellow beings can learn from it and enjoy it. Doing all this is what publishing is really about. We all need editing, and every collection of writing should reflect the intelligence, taste, and judgment of the editor. And of course, as readers we need someone with the patience and persistence to sort through the wildly various fiction on the Net and find some of its more interesting examples.
Which is why efforts such as this are so important. Jeff Carlson has taken on the task of reading through the year's fiction on the Net and selecting from it those pieces he finds best. I'm not here to comment on the success of his efforts, or the quality of the work he's chosen. I'm here to congratulate him on choosing to do so and also to congratulate those whose work he's presenting.
Perhaps the writers see their efforts here as stepping stones toward conventional publication, perhaps not. There's typically not much money to be made from such efforts such as these (though some folks, e.g., the folks at Yahoo, end up getting paid for what began as altruistic labors), but I'd like to believe that this work is at the heart of the Net as Counterforce, to use Thomas Pynchon's term.
That is why I have made my novel, Halo, published by Tor Books available on the WELL Gopher (and done so with their permission, I should add); also why Bruce Sterling has made his Hacker Crackdown and Richard Kadrey his Metrophage available at the same place. We share a belief that these alternative distribution routes mean something positive.
So I'm here not to review these writers' efforts but to encourage you to read
them and to come back for more if you like what you find. Congratulations to
them for being chosen, and to Jeff Carlson for choosing them. 
