...named "The Calorie Man" appears in "The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Third Annual Collection; edited by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin's Griffin, ISBN 0-312-35334-0)".

That was a great book! On a similar note (frictionless surfaces), I wonder if this could be applied towards the prevention of biofilms. It would certainly be a great boon to many industries.

Interestingly enough, being asked to click to 'continue' gives me a perfect opportunity to go do something else for a minute, knowing that when I get back, the stream will be paused right where I want to pick it up.

I'd imagine a 3D crossfade would be something like standing in front of a shop window on a sunny day, where you can still the street behind you 'semitransparently' overlayed on the shop interior. Once your eye commits to either scene, you can essentially stay focused on it without difficulty. While a 3D crossfade would have changing scene opacities, the only difficult part would possibly be the 50/50 point, which may end up being no more disorienting than a traditional crossfade. The eye would likely stay focused on one scenic element of the old scene until it was too obscured by the new scene, at which point the most likely 'refocus' point would be in the new scene.

Mr. Stephenson,

I have found your works to be both illuminating and invigorating. Having said that, why do you write? That is to say, Is there an overall guiding influence to your craft as a whole, and does that somehow inform what you set out to accomplish in each novel?

Kind Regards, Sergio A. Mora