Hello, my name is Stephen Ian Lakerson, but you can call me Steve. You are welcome to call me by this rather informal name whenever we are close enough to physically exchange palm germs. However, you may not call me Steve via email because I DO NOT OWN A HOME COMPUTER! Oh, that's right! Stop wiggling your pinky round and round your earlobe like you could somehow clean out all the stupid. I HAVE NO COMPUTER AND I STILL WRITE!

"Impossible", they cry! "What folly! He can't possibly be a REAL writer!" Go ahead and feel that way if you must, I couldn't give twelve horse patooeys! My methods are for myself, and myself alone. If you choose to wallow in the putrescent tommyrot of this corpselike shell of fartitude we call a society, that is your business and I will not judge you for it.

Listen, I'm not saying you also must write with a feather you plucked fresh from the belly of a peacock and dipped in ink imported from Sumeria, where written language was first conceived. I'm just saying that I prefer to be a REAL writer and not let some bell-and-whistle zoom vroom magical abacus ghostwrite my stories and change every third word to Bill Gates. Well, I am sorry that I write in the manner of the greats. Did the apostle Paul have a clapper when he composed his treatise to the Corinthians?

NO, I don't own a cell phone. I have no need to gab at my galpals about the latest hot-to-trot Beau Brummel in the shopping plaza. NO, I don't have a fax machine. Is there something you need to communicate with me that necessitates having an illegible resolution which looks like it was slapped together with a potato stamp and some jizz?

YES, I have a rotary telephone and NO, I will not answer it. If you would like to reach me (and lord knows what for) you can damn well do what has proven to work since our grandfathers were grandchildren, and send me a Cooke telegram! "A telegram?" they whine "But Steeeeve, that's so much WORK!" Well goddamnit, human interraction is SUPPOSED to be work! It's supposed to be a meshing of the human spirit, not a quick fix just because you need to know where the car is parked so you can pick up your Aunt Margaret at the ER. Calm down, woman! Wait a little. Waiting is GOOD for you. And if you can't find the car, use your two legs and start walking. Hey, there's a reason you had me buy you those $500 boots, kiddo. In the climax of my seminal 1972 short work Robot, Man, Robot, Man-Robot, Man, Robot the main character Ignavanov7 makes it perfectly clear that technology will eventually be the key to the total anihilation of our species. He does so by planting a space garden full of space cabbage, which becomes corrupted by globules of space excrement from the cybernetic mole people and ultimately withers and dies. Alas, the Cassandra yowls of Ignavanov7 went largely ignored in 1972, especially by the Nebula book awards, who chose instead to induct that civil war headed cunt, Issac Asimov. My premonitory words are still being ignored today.

Okay. What part of NO, I do not have any electric lights in my house don't you understand?

People come over to visit me under the auspices of being GUESTS in my home and the first damn thing they ask me is "Did someone hit a pole on your street?" Did someone hit a pole in your HEAD, dumdum? I mean, what other techno-lemming, clinging to the coattails of electricity like a mother's bloody nipple would have such a strategically placed arrangement of candles and oil-based hurricane lamps? I am no slave to man-made sunlight. I blow my stars out with a whisp of breathe and light the day with fire that blossoms from my pinky! I am Prometheus, and I grant you all the gift of shutting the fuck up!

This of course, was the inspiration for my 1986 novel Technotheus, where cybronaut Lydia Sy5id finds herself immersed in the world of compu-mafia from New York's now ramshackle Upper East Side known as UESCO and eventually must escape the cityfire by jettisoning herself into earth's dying sun. And much like Jonathan Peaceman White in Hunger on a Hungry Planet, I am crucified daily for my unconventional lifestyle. Just like White was crucified by the mciro-chip programmed dnizens of newspace/newearth for his "unconventional" time stalling machine.

Short anecdote: In the 90's, I was talked into something called "car rental" by my 4th wife and her children on one of our many "bonding" vacations. Well, I decided I'd rather drive through a stream than deal with the num-nut minivan owners on the highway. Halfway through the water, the cheap car just STOPS. My ex-wife is glaring at me in the way that women do when they think they've finally gotten something right. I turned to her and said "Darling, I'm a homo sapien. Sorry but I wasn't BORN with the knowledge of how to fix an automobile."

I mean, I cannot make this any more simple for you people! I would rather feel the palpable reality of my hand-cranked smoke alarm than reuly on the robotic beeping of some malevolent machine! As in my story Captain Robot and the Malevolent Machines, where Captain Robot builds a good machine in order to defeat the malevolent ones. He starts his own peaceful religion and they kill him, etc.

"But if you'll just buy some batteries, you can at least have a smoke alarm and then you'll be safe, whine whine whine." Science Fiction isn't safe! It's about going down in flames for what you believe in, like the seafaring android in Electrotech who eventually starts his own religion, peace, gets killed etc.

It's impossible to make my thoughts any more base! I've had enough of your superior attitudes and nose-thumbing at my textile-based typesetting machine, you Micro-whore Softies! Stay out of my life, evil robots disguised as my friends and colleagues and I shall stay out of yours!