I should admit, before I start talking about cyberspace fiction, that I once wrote a proto-cyberspace novel myself. It was called Escape Plans ; it vanished utterly. It was an uncompromising treatment, written in a kind of machine code, and unfortunately computers aren't able to make consumer choices… yet. It featured a class of people who were plugged in, and who worshiped not computers but logic operations, function, as their living God. In my version, jacking-in wasn't an élite activity and it wasn't cool. It was slavery for the masses. If you were privileged you didn't have to go in there: you could stay out in the material world and have fun. I could be right, about the real future of cyberspace—though you won't be plugged in to work, because there won't be any, it will be some kind of low resolution happy-juice entertainment to keep you quiet. But I couldn't have been more wrong about the way the fiction was going. Let me give you an example. This is a short extract from a novel called Arachne, by Lisa Mason. It came out in 1990, which means this is a late-Eighties future. As readers of science fiction will know, the sf future is an extrapolation of the writer's present. It deals with society's preoccupations at the exact time of writing. Anyway, the story's set in California, notionally about the midtwenty- first century. This is after the Big One. San Francisco is an island. It's an age of gridlocks that last for months, routine cosmetic body-shaping, independent AIs which are more or less human; lipgloss and powerdressing. Think LA Law with cyberspace. Think Eighties greed-is-good executives injecting whacking quantities of designer-cocaine-analogue into the hole in the back of their necks… Here's Carly Nolan, a ‘slim-limbed genny with customised morphing’. She's a fast-tracker in twenty-firstcentury corporate law, horribly aware that her whole future depends on her ability to make it on the other side of the screen. She's had a bad experience at court, in ‘telespace’. This is her return to planet earth: