"NODE ZERO" DEMOLISHED! Omniaveritas shot! (Version 2)

"Hello? Am I on the air? Well this is Professor -- woops, this is the voice of the Humanist Peace and Justice Coalition, uh, calling... Well, as everybody knows, we Humanists been putting up with a lot of guff from these cyberpunks, who've been swiping our Nebulas and ridiculing our angst. Then we heard rumors that they'd just called good old Robinson a "no-talent hippydippy arch-wimp." The time had come for a final showdown.

"So we took Connie's, uh, Comrade Tanya's, writing grant, and bought Amtrak tickets for everybody. We met in Austin and had some Campari-and-sodas downtown, then marched on their den of iniquity. And we stood in the alley downstairs and yelled challenges, until the CHEAP TRUTH staff finally heard us over their blaring heavy-metal punk drivel. Then Vince and Sue came out, and stood on the porch upstairs, and yelled abuse, and threatened to grab Nancy and Connie and Karen Joy and dip their braids in the inkwe ll. And that was followed by a barrage of spitwads and legal-sized paper airplanes with paperclips in the4 noses that really stung.

"So we had to get tough! First we gave 'em the introduction to PLANET ON THE TABLE, where Stan has the long talk with James Joyce. We could hear 'em vomiting inside, but they fired back with hard-tech expositive lumps from Toffler and Ilya Prigogine. So we hit 'em with both barrels: a chunk of self-reflexive metafiction and some third-hand magic realism.

"They reeled back howling and we rushed upstairs to the door, only to fined it barricaded with J.G. Ballard re-issues... That was the last straw, because we know Ballard officially belongs to us... Our blood was up, and we swarmed into the place, yelling the sacred name of LeGuin and lashing out right and left with our shepherd's crooks...

"Then suddenly Vince slipped on the slick footing of a copy of OMNI and crashed into his massive bank of computers... Big zaps of electricity jumped out of all this Frankenstein equipment which literateurs were not meant to know, and given all the paper, the whole place went up as fast as Shepard's reputation... Sue Denim sneaked out by disguising herself as a progressive feminist writer, and the last thing we heard was Vince screaming, "I meant Spider Robinson, you assholes."