Sometime the second or third year in college I began contemplation of an epic comic called Manmachine. I was a poetry major, into industrial music, and having fun not quite understanding the Iliad and Aneid. What I was not quite understanding is why I kept on feeling a distinctively anti-war tone to the epics while at the same time finding that reading them to violent, mechanical music was fun. I did not understand the "symptom," but found that Manmachine was compelling. Although I was not committed to or confident about finishing., it felt like the idea had legs and felt right. The idea of a fighting robot with no face. . . it seemed so natural that it could be taken for granted to exist already, "in the air". That aspect appealed to me: my first exposure to the sf author Philip K. Dick occurred with an Ace paperback of such low quality that it contained full color cigarette ads. Shortly after college I wrote my first comic book, a serial called "N.O.D.," which was sort of a pre-Matrix Matrix without kung-fu, published in a university b&w magazine. Writing that I was always aware that it was inferior to the Manmachine project in every way, but it was more "practicable".

After college I realized that many things in life are a zero-sum game. They simply do not add up and are not coherent. That realization was crucial to making progress, and towards making conflict and contradiction part of the structure of the project. What is needed is a framework to contain the contradiction. That frame is the bracket created by s and f: science fiction.

Later the discovery of the work of Warren S. McCulluch and Walter Pitts, Naomi Klein, the essay "The Uncanny" by Freud, and some Lacan for Dummies. . . bake in the oven and voila. A fine mess it is.