I don't believe in smart drugs, and I've never believed in smart drugs, but I do believe the following. It's genuinely useful to society to have some small, contained fraction of reckless fools who are willing to consume untested and unknown devices and substances. Sure, most of them will have their hearts explode or break out into great purple bleeding thalidomide warts. But who knows, maybe someday one of these jaspers will be eating handfuls of psychoactive crap out of some hippie pharmacy and he or she will suddenly learn to read Japanese in the original in six days. That's not at all likely, but it could happen-- grant me the possibility. The only drawback to this decentralized, libertarian, free-market regime of biomedical research is that you have to be ruthlessly prepared to sacrifice certain people-- just write 'em off, basically, like a cageful of control hamsters down at the NIMH. And if I ever met a man uniquely suited to this particular cutting-edge role in life, it is R.U. Sirius. R. U. Sirius basically resembles Gomez Addams in a purple fedora with an Andy Warhol badge pinned to the brim. The moment I met R.U., I felt a strong need to pith him and examine his viscera. I'm sure there are many other freelance biomedical researchers who will feel the same intellectual impulse. Read this book and you'll see what I mean. Then there's this saint person. Never draw to an inside straight. Never eat at a place called Mom's. And never eat a bag of ephedrine and a pumpkin pie ("the *whip* of vegetables!") from a California blonde who doesn't even have a real name. This female personage is so appallingly cagey that even her main squeeze delights in cryptographically baffling the NSA. If Pat Buchanan ever gets his not-so- secret wish and sets up a domestic American gulag for counterculture thought-criminals, the Judester's gonna be way, *way* up on the list-- maybe even number two, right after Bob Dobbs. Her trial's likely to prove rather interesting, however, as she only commits "crimes" in areas of social activity that haven't even been defined yet, much less successfully criminalized. A serious legal study of this woman's spectrum of activities would be like a CAT-scan of the American unconscious. There's also Bart Nagel, who is too nice a guy to be in the company of these people. Almost everything in this swell book is completely true. Except for everything about me. And my closest co- conspirators. We actual cyberpunks-- by this I mean *science fiction writers*, dammit, the people for whom the c-word was invented, the people who were professionally ahead of our time and were cyberpunks *twelve years ago*-- we never sneer and we never dress like, God forbid, Tom Wolfe. We just laugh at inappropriate times (like when testifying in Congress) and we dress and act just like industrial design professors.