If it were a physical nation, it would now be the third most populous on earth. Mr Zuckerberg is confident there will be a billion users in a few years. Facebook is unprecedented not only in its scale but also in its ability to blur boundaries between the real and virtual worlds.

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Facebook has certainly tried to guide the development of its online economy, almost in the way that governments seek to influence economic activity in the real world, through fiscal and monetary policy. Earlier this year the firm said it wanted applications running on its platform to accept its virtual currency, known as Facebook Credits. It argued that this was in the interests of Facebook users, who would no longer have to use different online currencies for different applications. But this infuriated some developers, who resent the fact that Facebook takes a 30% cut on every transaction involving credits.

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Facebook’s success “raises a lot of issues that we thought were a generation away,” says Edward Castronova, a professor at Indiana University. One of them is how much impact virtual economies and currencies will have on real world ones. The Chinese government has repeatedly curbed virtual currencies. Last year it banned their use to buy real-world goods and services, in part because of concerns about the impact on the yuan.

Radicals might also be fools for not realising that sf has had a fair few fellow-travellers for many years, too… but the underlying point is valid. Critiques of intellectual property, top-down power structures and the machinery of democracy are indeed rampant in modern culture, especially online, and especially in the sphere of science fiction. Whether that means sf is a vanguard for coming political change or merely a haven for otherwise unacceptable and marginal radical ideas (or perhaps both) remains to be seen

“I won’t dumb down Neuromancer,” he says. “There would be no point in making that version. We’ve seen things like that before. What is exciting about William Gibson’s vision in 2010 is how prescient it was. He really anticipated the post-human world. And I think we are entering that world very quickly. So, what draws me to the book – and what I think the film will offer that we haven’t seen before in the cinema – is an in-depth exploration of our growing relationships to the cybernetic universe. If Splice is about the evolution of our bodies, then Neuromancer will be about the evolution of our minds.”

Is Gibson involved in the creative process? And will the film be a blockbuster, or more of a purist science-fiction thing?

“Gibson is involved, and yes, he has been immensely supportive and I’m actively developing the script with his consultation,” says Natali. He tells me he is hoping that the success of Nolan’s film will help convince studios to greenlight a big-budget Neuromancer, but one which maintains the book’s cerebral impact. “The movie would not work without that kind of cash, and I wouldn’t want to do it,” he says. “I think with the advent of Inception there is now an example out there of how that would be possible.”

The attack on the hydroelectric station was the most dramatic outburst of violence in the Russian Caucasus in recent months. Although Kabardino-Balkariya sees less violence than nearby Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, the republic suffers from persistent tensions stemming from poverty and harsh police actions toward worship by unsanctioned Muslim sects.