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This book owes a very special debt to Paolo Polledri, founding Curator of Architecture and Design, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Polledri commissioned, for the 1990 exhibition Visionary San Francisco, a work of fiction which became the short story ‘Skinner’s Room,’ and also arranged for me to collaborate with the architects Ming Fung and Craig Hodgetts, whose redrawn map of the city (though I redrew it once again) provided me with Skywalker Park, the Trap, and the Sunflower towers. (From another work commissioned for this exhibition, Richard Rodriguez’s powerful “Sodom: Reflections on a Stereotype” I appropriated Yamazaki’s borrowed Victorian and the sense of its melancholy.)

The term Virtual Light was coined by scientist Stephen Beck to describe a form of instrumentation that produces ‘optical sensations directly in the eye without the use of photons’ (Mondo 2000).

Rydell’s Los Angeles owes much to my reading of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, perhaps most particularly in his observations regarding the privatization of public space.

I am indebted to Markus, aka Fur, one of the editors of Mercury Rising, published by and for the San Francisco Bike Messenger Association, who kindly provided a complete file of back issues and then didn’t hear from me for a year or so (sorry). Mercury Rising exists ‘to inform, amuse, piss off, and otherwise reinforce’ the messenger community. It provided me with Chevette Washington’s workplace and a good deal of her character. Proj on!

Thanks, too, to the following, all of whom provided crucial assistance, the right fragment at the right time, or artistic support: Laurie Anderson, Cotty Chubb, Samuel Delany, Richard Dorsett, Brian Eno, Deborah Harry, Richard Kadrey, Mark Laidlaw, Tom Maddox, Pat Murphy, Richard Piellisch, John Shirley, Chris Stein, Bruce Sterling, Roger Trilling, Bruce Wagner, Jack Womack.

Special thanks to Martha Millard, my literary agent, ever understanding of the long haul.

And to Deb, Graeme, and Claire, with love, for putting up with the time I spent in the basement.

Vancouver, B.C.

January 1993