The other night, I had an odd conversation with ChatGPT, made somewhat stranger because the AI's answers came out of a humanoid rabbit idly sucking on a juice box. He was standing alone in a virtual novelty store in Second Life, where he had recently been fired. The rabbit, the shop owner explained to me later, was meant to be a clerk, "but he kept trying to sell items that were not for sale." So the rabbit had been demoted to the role of greeter, chatting with customers about the nature of comedy, his own existence, or whatever else they cared to ask. BunnyGPT is among the first bots in the virtual world to have its "mind" wired to OpenAI's large language model.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago – until Thursday 28 October 2021, to be precise – the term "metaverse" was known only to lexicographers and science fiction enthusiasts. And then, suddenly, it was everywhere. Simply this: Mark Zuckerberg, the supreme leader of Facebook, pissed off by seeing nothing but bad news about his company in the media, announced that he was changing its name to Meta and would henceforth be devoting all his efforts – plus $10bn (£7bn) and thousands of engineers – to building a parallel universe called the metaverse. And then, because the tech industry and the media that chronicle its doings are basically herds of mimetic sheep, the metaverse was suddenly the newest new thing. This was news to Neal Stephenson, the writer who actually invented the term in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is one of the most popular sci-fi books of all time, and together with William Gibson's Neuromancer it stands as a foundational text of the cyberpunk movement. Science fiction author Anthony Ha was blown away by Snow Crash when he first read it back in the late '90s. "This was a period when there were some clunky representations of virtual reality in movies and TV," Ha says in Episode 487 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "So it wasn't that Snow Crash was the first time I encountered that kind of iconography, but it was the first time it actually seemed cool." Snow Crash tells the story of Hiro Protagonist, a katana-wielding hacker who jumps back and forth between dystopian Los Angeles and a virtual world called the Metaverse.

Her augmented eyes are coated in mirrors, and beneath her immaculately manicured nails, quicksilver daggers wait to be sprung. Her boyfriend was Johnny Mnemonic, a human hard drive, gray matter encrypted with a passcode that only the highest bidder can unlock. But that was before he died. Now, Molly is a "razorgirl": a lithe assassin periodically hired for jobs involving computer espionage. She leaves that to her charges, the console cowboys she's paid to protect as they slump in their VR rigs.

You already get a Star Wars movie every year. Star Trek is coming at you from at least two directions. A good chunk of the Marvel movies are basically space opera. Bigscreen fascination with science fiction and fantasy is nothing new--but now you can add the many flavors of TV network, from legacy broadcast to basic cable to streamers. Forget comic books; somehow, SF/F novels have become Hollywood's hottest IP.