It must have been about the time of the first moon landings when Brian Aldiss announced that the real world had caught up with science fiction: we are now living in the future. When the news reached me, a little later, I was unconvinced. Er—where's the galactic empires then? Where's Moonbase? Why haven't ‘we’ colonised Mars? Why am I still eating toast for breakfast, instead of protein-pills? Where's the warp drive, for heaven's sake? At last, there can be no doubt. The apotheosis is achieved. Cyberpunk is no longer science fiction, no longer a rough description of one or two good books and mixed bag of followers, nor even merely flavour of the month for a future-groupie élite, goggled in to three dimensional MTV. It is advertising, junk-food and channel-hopping. It is part of the world. This is no mean achievement for a brand of science fiction. We pretend we're writing about the far-flung future. But in the real world sf is strongly perceived as an artefact of the 1950s. To be considered post-modern is a great leap forward.

Cyberspace was never a classic science fiction. It is, or was, sheer fantasy, now bootstrapped into the real world by the will (maybe I should say tinkerbelled) of a few thousand virtual-reality nuts. By sheer longing, these characters dissolve the clunky actuality of their typing fingers, their goggleheads and gloves, into the limitless, god-polluted, metaphysical other world of William Gibson's metaphor. And who knows, maybe (as in one of those homespun Heinlein tales about the power of positive thinking) they'll get there. Meanwhile, ‘real’ cyberspace still belongs to the folks who can think in hexadecimal. Now, apparently, cyberpunk (the fiction) does too. Scientists have always written science fiction, but usually they have steered clear of gaudy fantasy. Cyberpunk is different, and a grasp of Boolean algebra doesn't necessarily mean you're an austere academic (nor even ordinarily literate). The hacker strikes back.

In classic style, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is set in a futurised-present or presentified-future of absolutely no rational date, sort of 2021 going on 1975. The IT industry has recently coalesced from brilliant hippiedom into Bill Gates; the children of Second World War vets are in their mid-twenties…