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cory doctorow
“Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the
editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it’s still an improvement.”
“And what does it say now?” asked Arthur.
“Mostly harmless,” admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed
cough.
[fn: My lifestyle is as gypsy and fancy-free as the characters
in
H2G2,
and as a result my copies of the Adams books are
thousands of miles away in storages in other countries, and this
essay was penned on public transit and in cheap hotel rooms in
Chile, Boston, London, Geneva, Brussels, Bergen, Geneva (again),
Toronto, Edinburgh, and Helsinki. Luckily, I was able to download
a dodgy, re-keyed version of the Adams books from a peer-to-
peer network, which I accessed via an open wireless network on
a random street-corner in an anonymous city, a fact that I note
here as testimony to the power of the Internet to do what the
Guide
does for Ford
and
Arthur: put all the information I need
at my fingertips, wherever I am. However, these texts are a little
on the dodgy side, as noted, so you might want to confirm these
quotes before, say, uttering them before an Adams truefan.]
And there’s the humor: every writer knows the pain of laboring
over a piece for days, infusing it with diverse interesting factoids
and insights, only to have it cut to ribbons by some distant editor.
(I once wrote thirty drafts of a 5,000-word article for an editor
who ended up running it in three paragraphs as accompaniment
for what he decided should be a photo essay with minimal
verbiage.)
Since the dawn of the Internet,
H2G2
geeks have taken it upon
themselves to attempt to make a
Guide
on the Internet. Volun-
teers wrote and submitted essays on various subjects as would be
likely to appear in a good encyclopedia, infusing them with equal
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