This brief, passionately argued book follows in the tradition of such critics as Jacques Ellul, Joseph Weizenbaum, Langdon Winner, Theodore Roszak, and Neil Postman. To say that Slouka, a lecturer in literature and culture at the University of California, San Diego, is disturbed by the excesses of “cyberspace” is to describe Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine, as a mild enthusiast. Slouka defines cyberspace as “not a space in the standard, three-dimensional sense of the word, but a metaphor, a symbolic ‘place’ we ‘inhabit’ but are not present in physically.…Cyberspace is also sometimes referred to as the Net” (pp. 154–155). What particularly exercises Slouka is the eagerness with which some promoters of an evolved cyberspace are willing to abandon the world of direct sensations and to adopt a virtual world in which basic human physical and emotional connections are broken.

The book’s title deliberately echoes that of the H. G. Wells classic. In Wells’s book, an alien invasion threatens the Earth; in Slouka’s book, the alien world of virtual reality threatens to overwhelm our real reality. To “prove” his case, however, Slouka relies exclusively on quotes from a few off-the-wall champions of the new world, whose remarks are so outrageous as to be ridiculous. As he himself says,

My quarrel is with a relatively small but disproportionately influential group of self-described ‘Net religionists’ and ‘wannabe gods’ who believe that the physical world can (and should) be ‘downloaded’ into a computer, who believe that the future of mankind is not in RL (real life) but in some form of VR (virtual reality); who are working very hard (and spending enormous amounts of both federal and private money) to engineer their very own version of the apocalypse (p. 10).

But if only a few extremists are making wild claims, then why bother to refute them? For Slouka’s quarrel to be taken seriously, he must show that the extremists somehow represent the majority, and this case has just not been made.

Much of the material that Slouka quotes is found in the New York Times and in the 1991 book, Cyberspace: first steps [1]. Consider the following representative remarks from Slouka’s book: “In cyberspace, Nicole Stenger promised, multiplied versions of the self would `blossom up everywhere.’ These multiplied selves would be `ideal, ironical, statistical.’ It would be ‘a springtime for schizophrenia!’” (pp. 61–62). “When virtual reality came on-line, Allucquere Rosanne Stone predicted, cyberspace would become ‘a toolkit for reconfiguring consciousness’; it would make it possible for a man to be `seen, and perhaps touched, as a woman and vice versa--or as anything else’” (p. 63). “The only thing wrong with the universe is that it is currently running someone else’s program” (Ken Karakotsios, p. 66). “When the scales fall from our eyes, we will see that our ‘origins are to be found in both the animal and the mechanical kingdoms, with the animal and the mechanical qualities together incorporated in the definition of human nature’” (Bruce Mazlish, p. 68). “`As we wire ourselves up into a hivish network…many things will emerge that we, as mere neurons in the network, don’t expect, don’t understand, can’t control, or don’t even perceive.’ But this, he explains patiently, is ‘the price for any emergent hive mind’” (Kevin Kelly, p. 97).

The picture that emerges is that of an information age that is not merely post-industrialist, but post-flesh, post-touching, post-human. It is to Slouka’s credit that he finds this vision of the future unthinkable. Kelly’s portrayal of the hive, with its mass of worker bees, evokes in Slouka’s mind images of the Nuremberg rallies with their masses of unthinking human drones.

But again, how representative are these extremists? If they speak for millions, we may indeed be doomed. If they speak for themselves, then so what? Slouka is not alone in his concerns; it is therefore surprising that he makes so little effort to align himself with the distinguished critics mentioned above. Nevertheless, we owe Slouka a debt of gratitude for reminding us that monstrous thoughts (if not monsters) are in our midst. I regret that so many critiques of unbridled technology have been written by humanists; those with technical expertise, who can and should set the record straight, are all too often silent. Slouka may inspire those people to actively refute the cyberists and digerati and defend basic human values.