"So Much Fantasizing That Was Meant to Provoke Horror Now Seems to Be Regarded as a Wellspring of Good Ideas"

"This misreading, and the yearning it reveals, would be amusing if it didn't have such potentially dire consequences, fueling the minds of the people with the most resources and power to turn, as Lepore puts it, 'a science-fiction dystopia into a fully functioning infrastructure.' What stayed with the Silicon Valley magnates was the idea of abandoning our bodies and the messiness of other people, leaving behind our finitude for an infinity of stars and self-coding machines. But this is actually a nightmare, a false escape, as the source material hints at without much subtlety. What happens next may depend on whether these boys grow up and finally recognize what they failed to see before."

Gal Beckerman at The Atlantic reviews Jill Lepore's The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.