I didn't see myself going anywhere deliberately because books are always a space of meditation for me. I wanted to meditate on this business about race, all the cons and hypes about it. Most of the book takes place in Brighton, which is a town southeast of London. Then I made up this little island that's 90 miles from Brighton. So those are the spaces of the book.
People are scared about money.
The Net means a whole lot of things. It means the World Wide Web, where people can put up what they want to some extent, although that's slowly stopping. But the Web's not interactive, where MOOs and MUDs are, and the rules for those are more of utopia than of the society which created them. Gender, race, any appearance really, is completely up for grabs. In MOOs and MUDs, people tend to hang a lot up at the door when they go in, where in real-time they can't.