Speaker's comments: "First off, I'm an entertainer. I've made my living as one for over half my life, which qualifies me as a success, if not exactly a star - yet. Primarily my medium has been written fiction. But I do have good stage presence, and can hold stage well.

"What I envision for events featuring an appearance from me is to remain what I am, an entertainer. I think the need for entertainment is as fundamental to the human organism as the need for food or sex; I see mine as a noble calling. And hey, it's what people have given me by far the most money for doing.

"My second priority, of course, is Spreading the Word. In every word I've sold - and in fact in most I've ever written - I've tried to promote individual liberty. It was pretty damned covert, a lot of the time; but I always did what I could.

"What I envision doing at political events amounts primarily to rabble-rousing, which is also how I envision my role at The Libertarian Enterprise. I think that's what the freedom movement needs right now: Someone to get people passionate about liberty. Or at least appeal to them on some level other than the dryly rational.

"I can do presentations to a number of audiences on a number of topics, but the one I look at as the most urgent and exciting is addressing libertarian groups, or groups of people interested in freedom, and telling them that:

1. a free society is attainable;
2. in the near future, not "20-30 years" [which from a lifetime of listening to promises we'd have, say, fusion power in "20-30 years" I now understand to be a euphemism for, "never. But send money anyway"]; and
3. here's how to get there, or at least one way among many possibilities.

"For SF oriented groups, my spiel would likely concentrate on the future and freedom; why the advance of technology seems to be intrinsically decentralizing, and why that's good, unless you think people ought to be your property; how, on the other hand, if we don't abolish government soon it can and will obtain the means of unbreakably enslaving - or simply doing without - us; how, finally, if government does not take it away, we may we have a future in which we're all, basically, goddesses and gods without possessions, albeit with all the toys we want.

"Product-differentiation note: in contrast to most of my earlier work, and some I'll continue to produce, and in contrast to most libertarians or indeed most of SF, in my fiction from here on in I plan mainly to promulgate a positive vision of the future: the future I want to live in, a future I believe we all can live in, and which, in my writing and speaking - and everyday life - I will be devoting every effort to bring about. I'm not offering a perfect future; nobody can do that. What I'm offering is not an end to evil and suffering, but an end to their institutionalization, in the form of government.

"My talks to gun groups would include the themes:

1. compromise is graduated surrender;
2. borrowing L. Neil Smith's classic theme of "What Would You Give Up to Keep Your Guns," and emphasizing the interpretation of the Non-Aggression Principle (part of whose beauty is that it has many facets, but only one meaning) which reads, "to be left alone, you must leave alone."

"Other interests that might prove appropriate include history, personal defense, and liberty and the environment. I'm willing to take a swing at just about anything.

"My best known book is still probably The Cybernetic Samurai; among other things it offered one of the earliest visions of what we now call "virtual reality" that wasn't just a ripoff of the movie Tron. And it and its sequel, The Cybernetic Shogun, [a title I didn't pick and don't like] still hold up well enough, I think, that I'm looking to get them republished. The problem is, I'm not that interested in talking about computers. I kind of think we're at the stage of taking them for granted, and talking about far more interesting things - such as nanotechnology - which have been made possible by computers."