This is the first time they've been published in full. I decided to include them in this version because there are various connections to the themes of the novel, notably our relationship with technology and some of the ideas discussed in Part 3. And of course, they are the original model for Miles' website, the contents of which Pete interprets as "messages from the Overmind".
With the obvious exception of the ones that did make it into the final edit, I don't regard them as an intrinsic part of the novel - I see them more as an optional extra, which may be of interest to some readers. But they won't be to everyone's taste - and even I have been known to describe this phase of my writing "career" as several years spent "cloistered in the monastery of obscure experimentalism" (and I'm probably their biggest fan). So if you find yourself losing patience with them, that just proves I was right not to include more of them in the novel.
Considering their age, there are, inevitably, some technological references which date them somewhat. For example, if you've grown up using mobile phones, I suspect that a passage describing an old-style landline telephone with an elasticated spiral cord won't have the same resonance for you as it does for me (see Chapter 2 of "A blight in the field of antennae"). The same may be true of references to a dictaphone that records using cassettes with old fashioned magnetic tape (see "Life without hands").
Does that matter though? As a student, I remember discovering that certain poems by the French writer Stéphane Mallarmé contained references which were intended to recall the way that books used to be bound with their pages folded over and uncut. This meant that you would sit there reading a book with paper knife in hand, ready to slice through the folds when you needed to turn the page. Now that printing and binding technology has moved on, that experience is entirely foreign to us (all the more so since you're almost certainly reading this on a screen). But people are still reading Mallarmé and finding meaning in his work, even though the reading experience is no longer as physical as he would've envisaged when he wrote it.
I also mention Mallarmé because some of his work required a very particular typographical layout - which happens to be true of several of the pieces in this collection. Unfortunately, I've been unable to present those poems as web pages, since responsive website technology makes it impossible to guarantee exactly how they will appear on the screen. That's why two of the pieces are in PDF and one is displayed as PNG image - although wherever possible, I've used web pages.
Lastly, I'm conscious that reading poetry tends to demand more of the reader than prose - so I hope these pieces prove worthy of your time and effort.
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