The Dude doesn’t know how many of his readers have read any William Gibson (and if you haven’t, you should), especially his earlier works that made him the de facto founder of the cyberpunk literary movement: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. These books, which have been since termed his “Sprawl Trilogy”, are the popular origins of many of the terms we take for granted, such as cyberspace, netsurfing, jacking in, and others. One trope that spans the work, and has influenced others since then, is virtual reality- be it experienced via a Go-go rig (Goggles and Gloves ala the Johnny Mnemonic movie), or some sort of neural implant. Since it seems that the curse of the Baby Boomers to continually ask “Where are my flying cars?”, is it our fate to ask the same of VR? Do we really want it? 100 Quatloos to the first person to correctly identify the origin (title and artist) of the song lyrics quoted on the title line without looking it up (ie. cheating). Cool image of night-time Chiba City taken from Wikipedia.