Synopsis:

Cybergypsies are hard-core Net travellers. The author describes the people he has met over his 15 years exploring the Net: virus writers, hackers, sex-peddlars, conmen et al. He describes how he nearly lost everything through his obsession, but also shows how the Net can be used for positive aims, such as campaigns for human rights and justice.

Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk:

Once the Net and the Web were new, and when the adventurous and unwary spent too much time there, flirting with each other in verbal disguise... The story of bad behaviour - fanaticism about small rows, gender-disguised "Netsex", the spending of other people's money on vast phone-bills - has been told by others - Indra Sinha tells it in a British context where the poverty and uncertainty of the Thatcher era made everything that bit more intense and obsessive. This is also the story of the near-collapse of a marriage - he withdrew from his wife and dragged her off to meet Net chums who never showed up - or showed up and never introduced themselves... These were also the years of his growing political commitment - a highly paid copywriter, he started using his skills for good causes like exposing the use of chemical weapons by Saddam against the Kurds. He writes well about his discomfort his Net friends' games of expensive verbal sado-masochism in the face of real evil. This is a moving and wise book about a man who loved games, and came to feel that he could no longer, in conscience play them; there is real pain here, in his rejection of a sort of beauty.

From 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.