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I didn't have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.

Our manifesto, whatever it will be called, will come from the people who are really in charge of this country, and that's the American people.

So many differing opinions and philosophies... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine.

A magazine is simply a device to induce people to read advertising.

If you stand at an election and put a manifesto in front of people saying you're going to improve health care, you have to stick by that.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

You can't put yourself into competition with a magazine like 'Vogue.' You have to create something new, something different.

A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.