There’s a weird intellectual pleasure in exploring the odd, the offbeat, and the arcane. It reminds me of when I was doing historical research for the novel The Difference Engine, set in the nineteenth century. You start the process by paging through the Official History. Then you dig back farther into the stuff that the official history mandarins merely footnote. There you find a reference to something that almost no authority is willing to cite. Then dig down just one more layer and: Whoa!
— Bruce Sterling. “Foreword”. The happy mutant handbook, edited by Frauenfelder, Sinclair, & Branwyn, Riverhead Books, 1995.