Bibliographic suggestions (see web site for more information)
Caras, Pauline. "Literature and Computers. A Short Bibliography, 1980-1987." In College
Literature 15 (1988) 69-82.
Porush, David. The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fic tion. New York: Methuen, 1985. A discussion
of fiction about cybernetics and computers in such authors as Vonnegut, Burroughs, Pynchon,
Barth, Beckett, and Barthelme. Bibliography.
Warrick, Patrcia S. The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. A discus sion of types of
science fiction that have supproted stories about automata, robots, computers. Includes
bibliographies of studies, indexes, fiction, and anthologies.
Asimov, Isaac et al. Machines That Think. Orlando, FL: Holt, Rinehart Winston, 1983.
Twentynine classic tales, chiefly from 1932 to 1973.
Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. New York: New American Library, 1956. Perhaps the best known cycle
of tales on robots by a single author.
Barth, John. Giles GoatBoy. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1987. A satire after Swift and Sterne
on the alternate world of the computer as troll, mechanist universe, and author.
Beirce, Ambrose. ``Moxon's Master'' (1893). Do machines think?
Bruner, John. The Shockwave River. New York: Ballantine, 1984. Gives new meaning to the
phrase ``computerhuman interface.''
Butler, Samuel. Erewhon (1872). See ``The Book of the Machine,'' chapters 2123.
Clarke, Arthur C. 2001. New York: New American Library, 1972. Based on the filmscript by
Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. See also Clarke's sequels, 2010 (also a film) and 2061.
Conklin, Groff. Science Fiction Thinking Machines. New York: Vanguard, 1954. An early
collection of tales about robots, androids, and computers.
Forster, E. M. ``The Machine Stops'' (1909). A forecast in 1909 of the dystopian theme of
twentieth century mechanized society as insect hive.
Heinlein, Robert. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. New York: Ace, 1987. A moon civilization
overthrows exploitation by earth when it is led by its computer.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (1932). Original outcry against mechaniza tion, genetic
engineering, and mind control.
Orwell, George. 1984 (1949). The classic contemporary dystopia of the technototalitarian state
and its impact on political thought, political language, and personal feeling.
Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time.
Roszak, Theodore. Bugs. New York: Doubleday, 1981. The computer as insect by the author of
The Cult of Information.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (1818). Amazingly perfective anticipations of issues in biotechnology,
the social responsibility of the scientist, and the psychology of double identity which will astonish
readers who only know the movie versions.
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell, 1959. The army as the ultimate human
machine.
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Player Piano. New York: Scribners, 1952. A machinetechnological political
and social elite.
Wells, H. G. A Modern Utopia (1905). A professionaltechnocratic utopia, probably the occasion
for Forster's satiric reply, ``The Machine Stops.''
Wells, H. G. The Time Machine (1895). Unexpectedly thoughtful and provoca tive Marxian and
Darwinian speculations into a far future in which human work roles, classes, races, and species
have become redefined in radically unexpected ways.
Bolter, J. David. Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. 1984. A major
interpretation, by a classicist who is also a computer scientist, of the intellectual and philosophical
impact of the computer upon ways of thinking about basic concepts of time, memory, quantity,
creativity, and intelligence. Each civilization tends to define itself by one technological image:
once it was the loom, the clock, and the steam engine, and now the computer.
Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987. A deep analysis of word processing using the language theories of
Wittgenstein, Eric Holbrook, and Martin Heidegger.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Technological optimism that electronic information
will be open, auditory, parallel, social, and global, replacing print information in books that has
been closed, visual, serial, individual, and restrictive. An influential book.
Mitchell, William J. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge: MIT, 1995.
Penrose. Roger. Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Con sciousness.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. 1994.
Dery, Mark, ed. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham: Duke Univ., 1994.
Gardner, Howard. The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolu tion. Although
the human mind is turning out to seem less and less like a digital computer, computer and artificial
intelligence modelling and simulation have been necessary to recent develop ments in cognitive
psychology. Gardner traces connections between computing, cognitive psychol ogy, and
philosophy, psychology, information theory, linguistics, anthropology, mathematics, and theories
of perception and representation.
Sanders, Barry. A is for Ox: Violence, Electronic Media, and th e Silencing of the Writ ten Word,
New York: Pantheon, 1994.
Campbell, Jeremy. Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life. 1982. A
stimulating and widereaching synthesis of C;aide Shannon's communication and information
theory and its implications for man as a grammarmaking animal who uses both natural languages
and computer programming languages. Moreover, man is also a grammarmade animal since
genetic DNA seems to operate as a kind of information channel.
Dennett, Daniel C. Brainstorms: Philosophic Essays on Mind and Psychology. Analyses of
problems of mind, brain, and computer models of thought, perception, and sensation. "Dennett's
graceful style and comparative lack of inreferences and jargon make this book much more
engaging than the average philosophy book" (Hofstadter).
Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. 1964. The book that is the starting point for much
criticism of modern technology and its negative impact on human culture and society.
Hardison, O. B. Disappearing Through the Skylight : Culture and Technology in the Twentieth
Century. New York : Viking, 1989. Profound queries into the arrival of modernism and
technology in the twentieth century and the apparent result: the disappearance of traditional ideas
of nature, history, language, art, and human selfidentity. Highly recom mended.
Hofstadter, Douglas and Dennett, compilers. The Mind's I. A collection with stimulating articles,
fiction, and essays on mind, soul, and self in philosophy, literature, and artificial intelligence.
Hofstadter later said its goal was "to probe the mysteries of matter and consciousness in as vivid
and jolting a way as possible." The jolt comes from "the curious fact (or illusion) that something
we call an 'I' is somehow connected to some hunk of matter floating somewhere and somewhen in
the universe."
Hofstadter, Douglas. G”del, Escher, Bach. A stimulating, fascinating, but demanding book on
selfreferential loops in the mathematician G”del, the painter Escher, and the composer Johann
Sebastian Bach, with fascinating implications for mathematical logic, DNA, music, art, computer
programming, and artificial intelligence. The author later said: "In essence, GEB was one
extended flash having to do with Kurt G”del's famous incompleteness theorem, the human brain,
and the mystery of consciousness. It is well described on its cover as 'a metaphorical fugue of
minds and machines.'" A stimulating, fascinating, but demanding book on selfreferential loops in
the mathematician Goedel, the painter Escher, and the composer J. S. Bach, with implications for
mathematical logic, DNA, music, art, computer programming, and AI. Impressive
bibliography.
McCorduck, Pamela. Machines Who Think. 1979. Subtitle: "A Per sonal Inquiry into the History
and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence." Delightfully written, full of enthusiasm for the
potentialities of artificial intelligence, with eyewitness accounts of actual events as well as a fine
survey of AI in literature and mythology from its flowerings to the 1960s and 1970s.
Bibliography.
Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Structured as a
mosaic of selfcontained pages, suggesting how the biological brain might operate locally but be
transformed when it functions globally as mind.
Penrose, Roger. The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and he Laws of
Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. A distinguished scientist, Pen rose moves
mindbody inquiries that oppose the "strong AI" position to the high ground of the philosophy of
science, cosmology, and quantum mechanics to explore what may be the natural limits of our
physicial knowledge of human consciousness.
Roszak, Theodore. The Cult of Information. 1986. Subtitled "The Folklore of Computers and the
True Art of Thinking," this debunking book by the author of The Making of a Counter Culture
notes that we may be facing an information glut, the menace of hidden agendas in computer
literacy programs, and dangerous databanks that can curtail our civil liberties. One of the best
antidotes to overly optimistic books about the future of computing.
Dunn, Thomas P. and Richard D. Erlich, eds. The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. Eighteen essays. Good bibliography.
Erlich, Richard D. and Thomas P. Dunn, eds. Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in
SF. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. Fifteen essays. Useful bibliography.
Landow, George and Paul Delany, eds. The Digital Word. MIT 1993 $39.95. A collection of
essays on text projects, electronic texts, text retrieval, text software, text corpora, text editing,
electronic conferences, scholarly research, electronic publishing, critical analysis, and electronic
reading.
Landow, George P., ed. Hyper/Text/Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994.
Landow, George P. Hypertext : the Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology. Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr. 1992. $45.00. ISBN 0801842808. Bibliography. Parallels
between postmodern deconstruction in literary theory as practiced by Jacques Derrida and Roland
Barthes and he decentered, readerly, and antihierarchial structure of recent computer hyper
texts.
Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Criticial Theory and
Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992.
Mowshowitz, Abbe. Inside Information: Computers in Fiction. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley,
1977. A collection of some three dozen works or excerpts from works of fiction that pertain to
computers or computing; good bibliography. (The book was an outgrowth of the same author's
study of information processing, The Conquest of Will.) Bibliography.
Muller, Herbert J. The Children of Frankenstein: A Primer of Modern Technology and Human
Values. Indiana, 1970. A humanist approach to problems of technology in society and culture that
acknowledges its starting point in previous works by Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul.
Nelson, Ted. Computer Lib/ Dream Machines. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, rev. ed., 1987. A
reissue with some revisions of the classic 1974 doubledecker that intro duced the notion of
hypertext.
Nichols, Peter The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979). Enlarged by John Clute and Peter
Nicholls (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1993, update 1995). Informative articles on such
subjects as automation, computers, communications, cybernetics, cyborgs, linguistics, intelligence,
and technology.
Tuman, Myron C., ed. Literacy Online : The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with
Computers. Univ. of Pittsburgh Pr. 1992 $34.95. ISBN 0822937018. An outstand ing collection
of essays on the nature of literary texts, teaching English, and critical thought, addressing the
impact of computers and computing technology upon standards of public literacy.
Tuman, Myron C. Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age. Univ. of Pittsburgh Pr. 1992.
ISBN 1822937352. The place of the computer in the rivalry between print literacy and online
literacy, and the consequences therefrom for college instruction in literature, reading, and
writing.
Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self. Simon & Schuster, 1985. A remarkable and original book which
applies six years of sociological and psychological research, as well as the prin ciples of Piaget and
Freud, to the question of what children, adolescents, adult beginners, and professionals feel about
computers and what they feel about themselves while using computers. The result, the notion of a
"second self" or an extension of identity, is an important contribution to our understanding of
what computer technology means to human personality and culture.
Espen Aarseth, Cybertext:
Perspectives in Ergodic Literature
Theodor Nelson, Literary
Machines 93.1
Michael Joyce, Of
Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics
Links to online sources for 379:
http://www.andromeda.rutgers,edu/~ehrlich/379/379text_bib.html
Incidental questions:
What are the most important scholarly studies and works of creative fiction that appeared
it the last ten years?