fairly crude IBM mainframe cad-cam program in WinchesterEngland.... The thing that's most immediately striking aboutLatham's computer artworks -- *ghost sculptures* he calls them-- is that the guy really possesses a sense of taste. Fractalart tends to be quite garish. Latham's stuff is very fractallyand organic, it's utterly weird, but at the same time it's veryaccomplished and subtle. There's a quality of ecstasy and dreadto it... there's a sense of genuine enchantment there. A lot ofcomputer games are stuffed to the gunwales with enchanters andwizards and so-called magic, but that kind of sci-fi codmysticism seems very dime-store stuff by comparison with Latham.

I like to imagine the future of computer games as beingsomething like the Steve Jackson Games bust by the SecretService, only in this case what they were busting wouldn't havebeen a mistake, it would have been something actually quiteseriously inexplicable and possibly even a genuine culturalthreat.... Something of the sort may come from virtual reality.I rather imagine something like an LSD backlash occuring there;something along the lines of: "Hey we have something here thatcan really seriously boost your imagination!" "Well, MrDeveloper, I'm afraid we here in the Food Drug and SoftwareAdministration don't really approve of that." That could happen.I think there are some visionary computer police around who areseriously interested in that prospect, they see it as a verypromising growing market for law enforcement, it's kind of theirversion of a golden vaporware.

I now want to talk some about the differences between your artand my art. My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new asliterary arts go, but it labors under the curse of threethousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in directcompetition with Homer and Euripides. I mean, these guys aren'tin the SFWA, but their product is still taking up valuable