Overview
Naked Lunch meets Confessions of an Opium Eater in the virtual world: A mesmerizing first-person account.Whatever you have heard, read, or fantasized about the Internet, the truth is stranger, funnier, more horrifying. Along the invisible pathways of the technonight wanders a strange tribe undetected by the millions of everyday net users. Some cybergypsies are geeks, technoanarchists who swap computer viruses like baseball cards. But most are seemingly ordinary people, bankers, lawyers, police officers, who at night assume strange identities and engage in weird mind-twisting games, getting their thrills from virtual sex, violence, and even cannibalism. Games leak into their real lives, often with disastrous results.
The Cybergypsies is the story of "Bear," an advertising writer with a wife, children, and a rambling house in the English countryside, who's about to sacrifice everything to his addiction. Bear's real and imaginary lives fuse in a series of bizarre (and often hilarious) adventures. Phantasmagoric tragedies are woven into the dark patterns of his life, building to a personal moral crisis. As the net closes in on him, Bear makes one last desperate attempt to save his marriage.
Two centuries ago, Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater exposed the fantastic world of the opium addict. The Cybergypsies does the same for the virtual world of the cyber addict. On a continuum from William Burroughs and William Gibson, Bear's odyssey takes us into an intoxicating world--alternately terrrifying and ridiculous--where reality and imagination are indistinguishable. It is at once technopuzzle, confession, and strikingly original literary debut.
Editorials
Anita Hamilton
Ever wonder what going online was like before the dawn of the World Wide Web? Sinha offers an intriguing look at this spiral into Net addiction during the 1980s as he gets sucked into intense role-playing games and meets eccentric computer-virus writers and fellow Net addicts. Along the way, he discovers that experience is equally real, whether online or in the flesh. While the blurring of reality and illusion is not a new theme, Sinha's rich narrative and thoughtful observations propel this engaging memoir.— Time
Publishers Weekly -
The Internet circa 1984 was a far cry from the placid swaths of corporate real estate surfed by many netizens today. Home to a hard-core online elite dialing into BBSs (bulletin boards) and MUDs (multi-user dungeons), it was an anarchic terrain where the virtual risks and rewards were so potent that, for the handful of users chronicled by Sinha, the sight of a modem jack slipping into a port was like a heroin-juiced needle to a junkie. Sinha, who was a copywriter at a London advertising agency, got hooked on multi-user role-playing games from his very first logon, ecstatic at the thought that in cyberspace he could create and share new worlds. As he relates how he started neglecting his "real" life to the point that his wife called herself a "modem widow" and he began speaking a garbled language of keyboard commands, he likens his exploits to those of Coleridge and de Quincey on opium. Along the way, however, Sinha used the Internet to spark political change in the off-line world, leveraging the online community to raise funds for Kurdish refugees and conveying the horrors of the Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal, India. Narrated with wit and moments of literary flair in the nonlinear style of the Internet itself, this book amounts to a sort of architectural dig, excavating bits of data and random-access memories from "that peculiar world of ours which has all but vanished" into the comfortable protocols of America Online. As today's techies struggle against the malling of the Net, Sinha offers an important reminder of the radical freedoms that defined the early age of cyberspace exploration. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
From its opening lines, the heart of this cybertale of online addiction becomes immediately apparent--and therein lies the strength of Sinha's dark, impressionistic look at the more dangerous side effects of the Internet: electronic lust, war, and betrayal never seemed so immediate, so possible--or so true. Indeed, it all did happen to Sinha, who met the Internet in 1984 while holding down a senior job in a London advertising firm. Sinha planned his book, which was to be an expos of this "closed, secret world that at the time the public at large knew nothing about," soon after his first online experiences. The end result is a lyrical if at times abrupt literary surf through a world where ordinary people and freaks seek to exist side by side, freely swapping roles in a society at once more safe and more dangerous than our own. It's an interesting look at the breadth of our human potential. For public and academic libraries.--Geoff Rotunno, "Valley Voice Newspaper," Goleta, CA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.From The Critics
A recent study by the American Psychological Association claims that 5.7 percent of the online population is "addicted" to the Net. While experts may argue with the figure, perhaps the best poster child for the trend is Indra Sinha, a man whose marriage nearly collapsed because of his relationship with the Internet.Sinha's descent into the inferno is painstakingly documented in Cybergypsies, which, even at a hefty 391 pages, weaves a fluid tale of the competing worlds of physical reality and cyber-reality. By extension, the book also serves as a nontechie history of early Net communities like the Well and U.K.-based Greennet.
Sinha's alter ego in the book is "Bear" a name most likely stolen from his online "handle," which only adds to the story's intended confusion between real life and online life. In "reality" Sinha is a thirtysomething ad exec who lives in the English city of Sussex with his wife and three children.
Sinha's introduction to cyberspace started out innocently enough. In 1984, as part of his research for a modem ad he's been hired to write, Sinha takes home an Apricot computer (an early Apple competitor) and a modem. He clicks on the Apricot, the modem whirs, and Bear, turned on to an early multiuser game called Shades, falls headfirst into the global community of loners and hackers who give over their real lives to this imaginary space.
The world that envelopes Bear seems borrowed from the pages of Tolkien's The Hobbit; other times it's as if the author has unlocked a door in Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.
Bear's fantastical band of pranksters includes a hacker in Oklahoma named Geno Paris (his real name); a femme fatale called Calypso who robs men of their money, and even leads one to suicide; and Luna, a disembodied woman whose real identity is never known, but who enchants Bear because she has completely given herself over to the online life.
It's a fascinating chronicle of the Internet community before the Web. But this is no Neuromancer. Rather, Bear's tale seems like the account of a technical amateur who inexplicably finds himself entangled in a foreign underworld.
Bear ultimately wrestles with the definition of "reality." In one crucial moment, he tells a cyberfriend that it's not OK to act out fantasies in cyberspace that would cause damage in the real world, because one world ultimately seeps into the other. (In real life, Bear grapples with other issues of right and wrong, such as whether he should create an ad campaign for a nuclear power plant.)
Among the many vices tempting him, Bear, wildly enough, never commits adultery in cyberspace, at least not in any accepted sense. His late nights spent in front of the glowing screen are enough, however, for his wife to begin calling herself a "modem widow."
The hold that this world has on Bear is as strong as any chemical addiction. Sinha even admits a debt of inspiration to De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. But the author does not point a finger at the Net for the destruction of his marriage; instead, he questions the absence of rules and limitations in a sphere that he believes can be just as real as the one we physically inhabit.
Laura Rich
The lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management explains how many problems within companies and communities stem from individuals' inability to forge a constructive dialogue. "Our talk drives us apart," Isaacs writes.