Cadigan's work spikes the envelope of Ballard's alienation and penetrates, bloodied, into that sense of bewilderment and near-panic that underlies nightmare.

"At the hospital, people are offering themselves for exploratory surgery and vivisection. And the doctors who have a stomach for such things cut them open and explore their insides. Sometimes they remove internal organs and sew the people up again to see how they manage without them. They manage fine. And there is no blood, no blood anywhere."

A cursory web-search will tell you that Pat Cadigan is the Queen of Cyberpunk, but who wants to be queen of a moribund genre? BBC TV's Future Fantastic designated her, more promisingly, "the queen of modern science fiction;" Wired, though, may have come closest to the truth with the plaudit "sci-fi maverick."

These things seem to come around before you know it, don't they?

The art of movie adaptation is a tricky one; though Hollywood has scoured literature for material since moving pictures were invented, it's awfully easy for the process to go unspeakably awry.

Here's your own world, bounded by one coat