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THE EARLY DAYS OF THE INTERNET

THE CYBERGYPSIES - A True Tale of Lust, War and Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier
By Indra Sinha
Viking, 405 pp. $24.95

Indra Sinha’s first published novel, “The Cybergypsies,” is being hyped as the Internet generation’s answer to the Beat Generation’s “Naked Lunch” and an earlier generation’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” The comparison holds because all three books offer a peek into the netherworld of the drug subculture of their times.

Instead of opium or heroin, though, the drug that courses through the pages of “The Cybergypsies,” affecting both its narrator and readers alike, is the pulsing glow of the computer screen, and the all-enveloping fantasy environment of the Internet.

It’s not the Internet of today, though. The Net of “The Cybergypsies” takes place in the pre-World Wide Web version of the Internet.

Since 1994, when graphical Web browsers such as Netscape and the programming language called HTML made it possible to “surf” Web pages featuring formatted text and graphics, the Internet’s exploded with users and sites full of rich content and increasingly, bells and whistles such as animation and flashy special effects to grab viewers’ attention. That’s when the World Wide Web was popularized.

In the dark days of Internet prehistory, the international network of computer linkups was used more for education and research and less for entertainment. It wasn’t a mass medium, with millions of people worldwide logging on for news, information and myriad ways to waste time. A pioneering bunch of early adopters set up BBSs (bulletin boards), private online communities accessed via a telephone modem where members could communicate with each other and share data. Other pioneers found their way online to immerse themselves in the role-playing games that had evolved out of such offline fantasy games as “Dungeons and Dragons.”

It’s this early, fantasy-fueled Internet that Sinha captures in his book. It’s a largely non-fiction recollection of his immersion in -- and subsequent addiction to -- the emerging online world, and disconnection from his “real” life as an up-and-coming advertising agency copywriter as well as the strain his addiction places on his marriage.

The story’s told in non-linear fragments that suits the click-by-word-association mentality of the Internet itself; for readers used to more traditional narrative storytelling, the disjointed plotline might feel irritatingly choppy. But then, that’s how information is transmitted online - in disparate packets of digitized data that aren’t subject to real-world rules that govern time and space.

Once you settle into the rhythm of Sinha's short chapters, the storyline's logic becomes more apparent. It's like flipping at random through the snapshots in a photo album to get the full picture of someone's life.

That story starts with Sinha’s introduction to a new product, a computer modem, in 1984. A London advertising copywriter who has to hype this new gadget in the year of the Macintosh computer’s debut - at a time when “desktop publishing” has yet to be conceived, never mind the World Wide Web - Sinha logs on and discovers a nascent world of other neo-geeks and hipsters who spend much of their spare and money hanging out in the virtual worlds of multi-user games such as “Shades” and “The Vortex.” The characters Sinha, who goes by the nickname “Bear” both in the virtual and real worlds, meets have names such as “Luna, “Lilith,” “Gawain,” “Dreamdancer” and “Hagstor.”

Remember, this is the proto-Internet. The environments that Sinha describes isn’t on that appears in pictures and icons as we know the Web today. Instead, the virtual world of Shades were Sinha increasingly finds himself exploring into the wee hours of every evening is presented entirely in text. The computer screen of this Internet era flickered with descriptions such as: “>You step into a silver mist, intrigued by the way part of your body dissolve into nothingness…” followed by commands such as “>Type LOGIN, HELP or QUIT.” Every action from “look at Lilith” to “dress” and “undress” were tapped out letter-by-letter, instead of navigating by clicking on icons, buttons and hyperlinks.

Instead of showing you with pictures, the early virtual worlds of the Internet existed entirely in the imagination of the inhabitants.

But even using such crude navigation, Bear gets hooked on the places painted so vividly in words, and on the characters he finds there. He comes to meet the community of Shades players in “eff-2-eff” (face to face) get-togethers at pubs, and befriends some of them.

“The Cybergypsies” doesn’t quite live up to its intriguing subtitle, “A true tale of lust, war and betrayal on the electronic frontier,” because ultimately, the book isn’t about “lust, war and betrayal,” though all these things are part of the story. If you’re waiting for a thriller of a plot about international intrigue and action-adventure cliches, you’ll be disappointed. The book’s about Sinha’s descent into the depths of online addiction, and how it ultimately leads to his detachment from his wife Eve and his kids.

“Night after night into the small hours, with jobs undone, letters unanswered, bills unpaid and work the next morning, I’d sit tapping keys and piling up debts while upstairs, alone in our bed, Eve grew despairing,” Sinha writes in a particularly lucid passage. “My promises to her about the house, the garden, were forgotten as voices from cyberspace drew me away. At first these were the voices of real people, but gradually my life became peopled by cyber-entities, imaginary beings, bodiless golems which nonetheless had the power to act, start chains of cause and effect that ricocheted back into the ‘real’ world and rebounded on Eve who had no chance to know what was happening.”

But the addiction somehow never scuttles Bear’s advertising career. Sinha inserts snippets of his worklife (including how he got a hacker friend of his a job as the networking expert at his agency) and various creative assignments, though they start to blur with his online passions.

In fact, the personal travails of his cyberlife seem to bring Bear to a more political view in his professional life.

Halfway through the book, Sinha recalls how a series of ads for Amnesty International leads to a hilarious phone call with Anita Roddick, the famed enviro-entrepreneur owner of The Body Shop retail chain, while he’s online at his office, chatting it up with friends on Shades.

The betrayal and other extreme situations promised by the subtitle all happen to Sinha’s online friends, a motley crew of professionals and middle class folks who got hooked early on to the Internet an by turns fall in love, lose their money, and lie and cheat to keep access to a phone line - just a line, not the phone. “Don’t need a phone,” snarls Jarly, one of Bear’s more eccentric pals, when Bear visits him in his decrepit attic of an apartment. “Don’t want buggers ringing me. All my mates are on-line. Just need a gateway to the net.”

The storytelling isn’t new - the non-linear technique, perfect for recreating the online experience, was used by Burroughs in his drug-addled “Naked Lunch.” Sinha’s ultimately more lucid, and the addiction he lives through less scary than the life-threatening joneses of the Beat writers.

But Sinha’s a fine new voice for the current counterculture, and it’ll be fun following his progress as the now-retired adman writes more books for the new millennium.

This book review ran in the Denver Rocky Mountain News.