>From: marauder@diku.dk (Stephan Dahl)
Subject: Dragon under the Influence
Date: 16 May 91 13:27:14 GMT

Hmmm... think some neet.demon ate the first copy... repost:
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	The Dragon pauses, look up from some Rube Goldberg device He's
twisting into a shape out of imagination, and listens to the 'chat audio
hookup softly murmuring in the background.
	"Louder, please... "

>    "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."
...
>  "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."

	"Yeesss...." The Dragon leans back, and as the twisted thing on his
workbench shivers, tremble, and fall, He remembers...
	"Hmmm... Guess I read 'bout all the old stuff ... Never got through
Sturgeon, tho, guess no' my style... Much of my (rather meagre) income fills
the coffers of local bookstores, 'specially the ones w/ english paperbacks -
cheaper AND better than any translation ... Y'know, english paperbacks
*taught* me my english ... Can't really keep up, nowadays, seems stuff come
out so *fast*, but I do try..." Smiling wistfully, He engages the video
hookup as well, centers on Drifter's table, and, not being secretive,
projects a tiny silver Dragon holo onto the top of one of the empty cans
littering the table, just to let 'em know.
	
Jonathan Burns:
...
>Who's Leigh Brackett? Dead now, but she got writing credits on _Return
>of the Jedi_ before she went. In her day, besides some detective
>fiction, she was one of the Grand Old Men (ok, Women) of pulp science-
>fantasy. She did Mars the way it should have been: immemorial pueblo
>towns on the Canals at dusk; their cryptic old men and oblique seductive
>girls concealing their ingrained cosmic despair behind ritual and
>decoration. Venus almost as good, from a swamp terrain with hell-hole
>settlements like Borneo longhouse villages in the malaria season, to
>the Sea of Morning Opals, the floating seaweed islands and their tiny
>dragons. Brackett wrote scripts for Warners or MGM or somebody; I seem
>to remember she adapted one of Dashiell Hammett's books. What matters
>is, she wrote visually, and with conviction. Catherine L. Moore was
>of the same class. So was Andre Norton, though Norton's writing was
>never that good. We never had as good until Tanith Lee showed up.

	"Hey, I guess Brackett's too exotic to have ever reached Denmark,
but from what you say, it sounds like a neat reality ... Y'ever played
SPACE 1889, one of them RPG's? - sounds a lot like it..."

Ken Aubey:
>"When you're talkin' about the influences on cyberpunk, there's one that ya'
>jus' can't ignore. Raymond Chandler. The guy who wrote "The Long Goodbye" and
>the rest. Detective fiction. Yeah, I don't read it much, either, but this guy
>was  somethin' special. Without Chandler, there'd 'a' been no film noir, with
>no film noir, no cyberpunk. I recently read some of his stuff as research for
>another writing project, and was completely knocked out by it. If the guy was
>alive today, Philip Marlowe'd have a couple cyberlimbs and a smartgun."

	The small holo claps it's claws together "Bravo! Couldn't agree
more! Much of the, shall we say, Ambience, of cyberpunk comes not so much
from the tech, as from the tone of conversation, that icy invulnerability,
and noone does THAT better than Marlowe!"

Blackjack:
...
>"Of course, nothing that I do is without my less obvious influences,"
>Blackjack explains, his hands steepled in front of him.  "The Tao Te
>Ching and it's modern incarnation, A. A. Milne's Winne-The-Pooh
>books."

	"Say WHA?!?" The holo Dragon almost falls from his perch with
astonished laughter... "Nice to know there are still some amusing weirdness
in the world...<chuckle>"

Liralen (or some backup personality ;-):
...
>A maelstrom descends:

No kidding!
>[Maelstrom deleted]

	The Dragon reels from sensory overload (after all, ALL He sense is
data...), but as the flood recedes, He acknowledge the point.
	"It is true, when one list ones influences, the strictly literary
ones are important, but not exclusively so... A large part of on's style is
shaped by what one *is*, which in turn is shaped by what one *does*... Piers
Anthony admits this, in his "letters to the readers", or whatever he calls
them, he describes how events in his life affects his novels... in that
sense, writing can be cathartic (?) much like a psychiatrist can be; one can
*tell* somebody, even if it is just a piece of paper (or CRT, as the case
may be)... of course, if one is going to show the result to someone
afterwards (like posting to the net.world!!), it is more satisfying if the
*form* of the message is elegantly crafted too, sometimes the form
overshadows the content completely (as in some 'chat threads ;-), but always
the author is *there*, in the text, if one look careful enough." The Dragon
pause for breath, dissolves the holo and arrives in person (still just
another holo, just bigger, but now the personality was focused in the 'chat
proper)
	"That is why I so enjoy this place, Here, emphasis is put on form,
as opposed to the rest of the net., where emphasis is on content (and
brevity)" The Dragon (at yet another level of fiction) coughs embarrassedly,
looking upscreen at a rather big article "but anyway, Here, the little
stylistic curlicues and the sweeping Grand Dramas are the subject matter,
and also the form of the stories..." trailing off, shrugging...
	"Longwinded and obscure, sorry, I know, 's just how I *am* ..."
	He looks around, at least one at the table fast asleep, the others
look somewhat glazed, but hey, that might be the beer... He smiles wryly,
and returns

	Home. Shaking His head sadly, he tries to repair the little
mechanical arms, optical sensors on stalks (with eyelashes yet!) and
numerous pieces of paper tape that once made up a Turing Machine...
	"Shit. Hav'ta d'it all o'er 'gain..." He mumbles resignedly,
reaching for the bottle of glue...

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The Dragon	(aka marauder@freja.diku.dk)	(aka Stephan Dahl)
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Long .sig: (sorry, I know, but the rest of the article is bloated
		too, so what the heck)
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	When old age shall this
		generation waste,
	Thou shalt remain, in midst
		of other woe
	Than ours, a friend to man,
		to whom thou say'st
	"Beauty is truth, truth Beauty," -
		that is all
	Ye know on earth, and all ye
		need to know.

			Keats (1820) - He, too, relished form...
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