The Cybergypsies is not a novel, it is non-fiction. I chose to tell it like a novel because the experiences, whether mine or others', were so personal. Some parts are fictionalised, disguised in order to protect people's identities, but none of it is wholly fiction. Even the fantasies (the imagined realms of the roleplaying games I used to play, and the characters and
events therein) are real.

I'd been playing these games since the mid-eighties (first went online in 1984). There was one called Shades (real name) and another which in Cybergypsies I called the Vortex, because it likes to keep itself a secret. I met a lot of very odd people, some of whom I have only ever known online (twenty-year friendships without ever meeting in the flesh), others I got to know very well socially. I got mixed up in their lives and intrigues, online and off.

What stories there were to tell! Seductions, vampings,
fleecings, quarrels in cyberspace that turned into real world bomb threats, a feud that began with an online murder which ended up closing down a whole network - but when I tried to tell my real world friends about these things, they had no conception of what I was talking about. In those days nobody had ever heard of modems, they used to ask me what I was taking.

In the early 90s (still long before the Web) I was trying to
infiltrate a bunch of virus writers, seeking ways into their private bulletin board network and wheedling my way into their confidences. It took a long time, not least because I had to learn a great deal about viruses and had to appear to have at least a smattering of assembler code. The virus folk had strange names like Radioactive Rat and Screaming Radish. They were located all over the world - South Africa,
Australia, Brazil, Italy, Holland, Sweden. I became chums with a chap who called himself Jesus Slut Fucker. He lived in Oklahoma City and I would spend half the night chatting on his BBS via the modem. (At huge cost, in those days it meant a translatlantic telephone call.) It was another new, fascinating world, very exciting to me, but again, when I tried telling friends about it, I met with universal incomprehension.

So this is when I first had the idea of writing about my experiences and consciously began to gather material for a book about the secret world of the net - the old pre-Web net - and about the people who inhabited it. I called them Cybergypsies.

I'd always intended the book for a general readership, to expose this hidden world. It was originally planned in sections - the virus scene, roleplaying, cyber sutrans, hacking etc - plus sections on other stuff I was by then involved with online - human rights work with Amnesty and Kurdish refugees, campaigning, fundraising.

Luckily, events overtook me. What happened was the Web. Within a very short time everyone knew what a modem was, they all had email aaccounts and the topics I had been going to write about suddenly seemed like old hat.It was the best thing that could have happened, because instead of being forced to explain the technology I was able to concentrate on the characters. People like Geno aka Jesus Slut Fucker, Jarly the hacker, Luna the roleplayer who denied she was human, the lovely and lecherous Calypso. The Cybergypsies ended up being about the people and the net merely became its background.

[Excerpted from an interview on The Well]