In the late 1990s, the Internet was less than a decade old. Those of us who remembered the first fumbling steps toward it—dialing in to CompuServe and Genie , squealing modems, email that was batched at night when long distance rates were low (response times were a day at best, not seconds)—thought we were living in the future. If we remembered the days even further back (when mail meant paper and stamps and waiting a week or more for a reply), we knew that was so.
But that was a quarter century ago. There was still a tomorrow ahead of us. And when Algis Budrys founded the magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, better known as Tomorrowsf, he asked me to be his science columnist. A little later, I was asked to be the science books columnist for the short-lived GalaxyOnline Magazine.
The Tomorrowsf gig lasted for seventeen columns. Some of them have lost relevance since then but some have not. For some, such as discussions of SETI and space, the science has moved on but there remains historical interest. Therefore, with the encouragement of several twisted friends, I have bundled those columns (along with a few reviews of science books from that era) into an ebook and posted the ebook on Google Docs. Anyone can download it using the link below. It’s free, so have fun and feel free to share the link.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_0czHEN2nXyqGSANDaciPAITwX7Eb9fb/view?usp=sharing
