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Those of you who were introduced to the on-line world through the World Wide Web
don't know what you missed. Before the web, a "bulletin board" was some guy's computer you could dial into, and e-mail was passed from bulletin board to bulletin board across the Fidonet. It was a time when information on the "Internet" seemed to have a geographical basis, and those travelling the networks felt like they were drawing a new map, not reading a very fat book.
Probably everyone with literary pretensions who was involved with that scene has thought that there's a book in there. Fortunately, one proto-surfer has figured out how on earth you write about it in an interesting way, and even more fortunately, he turns out to be a thoroughly excellent writer.
The Cybergypsies is autobiographical, but is as much about fiction as fact. Recounting his dual life as an on-line personality and as an RL (MUD speak for "Real Life") human being with a family and a job as an award-winning advertising copywriter which gets him involved with Amnesty International, Anita Roddick and Jeffrey Archer, Singh explores both the impact of this dual life in terms of the on-line obsession that nearly cost him his marriage and the fascinating anthropology of the denizens of the new on-line world.
The book's strongest suit is the elegant sub-text on the nature of personal identity. There's no rigid temporal narrative (indeed, the narrative doesn't always stay in the real world). Singh blurs the reader's sense of "RL" and "on-line" to provoke a debate on the division of identity that an on-line avatar can create.
I have to admit to a certain bias towards this book.
Although I was a Compunetter and a Mudder (player of the on-line game MUD) while the author was a Micronetter and a Shadist (player of the on-line game Shades), the territory is familiar enough that it is like reading a novel set in my home town. It's strange to think that some of the characters in this book are people I have killed or been killed by in an on-line text adventure.
However, even if you don't share that experience, this is a book whose 400 pages are quickly devoured. The writing is absorbing, the menagerie of characters compelling, and the whole works superbly as a thought-provoking travelogue through the electronic Wild West of frontier-town early Internet.
Originally reviewed in issue 12
by Andrew Korn.
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