Circuits of the Wind: A Legend of the Net Age

THE LYRIC STORY OF THE NET GENERATION—GROWING UP AND COMING OF AGE ON THE INTERNET

The Internet is everywhere now, but Ray Valentine saw it first explode.

CIRCUITS OF THE WIND is the story of Ray's quest to find himself as he grows up wandering the computer underground—the wild, global outback that existed before the net went mainstream. How else does an end-of-century slacker reach out to the world from Sohola, that northern state that's a little more Midwest than it is New England? The net holds the key to what he's after—but even as he pioneers this virtual world, the veneer of his real life begins to crack.

VOLUME ONE of the CIRCUITS OF THE WIND trilogy follows a young Raymond from his '70s childhood—and first gropings with the telephone—to the home computers and bulletin boards of the '80s, where he leads a double life as a wanderer of the wires. But when even his virtual best friend unplugs, Raymond might have to leave it, too—because isn't real life supposed to be offline?

MICHAEL STUTZ coined the phrase "net generation" while working as a reporter for Wired News-and in the early 1990s kicked off the Wikipedia era by being the first to take "open source" beyond software. He lives in Space Age Central, the former home of the NASA rocket scientist who planned the Apollo Project.