This is cyberspace as an extended episode of Friends, the dalliance of a talented young professional with the latest lifestyle option. Seabrook mixes wise-cracking and soul-searching in equal measure. Quill-pen British readers will also enjoy his brahmin background. While browsing through an on-line archive, he is reminded of “walking through the Princeton boathouse in the dim light after crew practice”. Trying to account for the compulsiveness of net-surfing, he quotes a line from Eliot’s Four Quartets – “distracted from distraction by distraction”.Where Seabrook renders the Net as extended conviviality, Douglas Rushkoff sees it as only one sign of a completely new civilisation.

Children of Chaos refers to what Rushkoff calls the “screenagers” – those 12- to 25-year-olds in Britain and America whose consciousness is built from MTV, SuperMario, retro television, the joysticks and mouse-clicks of cyber-tech. Although his book sometimes reads as if dictated from under a virtual reality helmet, Rushkoff is to be commended for trying to link chaos theory and cultural critique so lucidly. When so much science is now invoked to limit our options – Darwinist psychology and sexual neurology being two recent culprits – it’s a change to read something that emphasises play and creativity as a norm of human nature.But Rushkoff embarrasses as much as he enlightens. The brilliant counter- intuitive readings of street culture that might work across a producer’s table (Rushkoff “develops content for TV and the Internet”, wouldn’t you know) sometimes don’t quite stretch to grown-up subjects. Bosnia’s bloodbath, for example, tests the author’s faith in the positive evolution of human culture.

“If you take a goldfish that has been kept in a tiny bowl and release him into a lake,” Rushkoff helpfully adds, “he will swim in tiny circles for quite a while before he realises he has more room.” The goldfish, in case you don’t get the analogy, is Bosnia.Donna Haraway would probably regard the goldfish as a non-human ally in the struggle against piscean incarceration. Rarely has the much-maligned subject of cultural studies produced such a case for the prosecution. Her bizarrely titled Modest Witness Second Millennium: Female Man (c)_Meets OncoMouse(tm) has one extraordinary premise, hammered through its appallingly written slabs of interdisciplinary babble. In the age of genetics and informatics, everything – whether human or non-human, organic or inorganic – is a political agent, and should be treated as such.You don’t believe me? Here we go: “Any interesting being in technoscience,” writes Haraway, “such as a textbook, molecule, equation, mouse, pipette, bomb, fungus, technician, agitator, or scientist, can – and often should – be teased open, to show the sticky economic, technical, political, organic, historical, mythic, and textual threads that make up its tissues.” Bonkers? Possibly.What’s irritating about this book is that there was never a greater need for an articulate critique of science, at a time when we are more than ever (in one of Haraway’s happier phrases) “bodies of data”. But how do you begin to grapple with the expanded range of human choices that digital tecnhnology and bioscience now offer if the guidebooks are as useless and hermetic as this?Perhaps the difference between cyber-cultures across the Atlantic lies in our lack of a frontier mentality. Our national dream is not the American one – that of unlimited space traversed by sovereign individuals, improvising their society into being, using technology (whether gun or modem) to exploit the wilderness (whether natural, or digital). To his credit, Seabrook keeps making this connection – to his own parents, grandparents and great- grandparents, all hucksters and grafters in the grand tradition of American blue-sky enterprise.No matter how pro-entrepreneurial the British parties of business claim to be, they will never infuse the next century with the same Whitmanesque fervour.

They will sing the body electric; we’ll curse the bloody electrics Which is probably as it should be.. Being reviewed is a lucky dip for an author. One person’s opinion is transmitted as a general cachet or black mark. In the past, Tibor Fischer has attracted the plaudits of such luminaries as Salman Rushdie, John Updike and A S Byatt This time he’s got me Tough. This preamble done, I can no longer delay my reluctant response to a fellow author: this book is truly terrible.

Fischer’s first novel, Under the Frog, was a justly acclaimed tragicomic vision of the Hungary of his parents’ generation, a place of young men twisting in the gyre of an idiotic regime, culminating in the romantic and ill-fated rebellion of 1956. “As a Hungarian,” a friend tells the hero of that book, Gyuri Fischer, “you should be prepared for the odd cataclysm.”
His second book, The Thought Gang, shifted this cataclysmic and anarchic vision into a contemporary tale of a philosopher who prefers bank robbery to academia. At one point, a friend of the protagonist suggests he would be at his best if he was sent back to the era of the Greeks, whence he could “communicate to us via red figure Attic vases.”In The Collector Collector, this is precisely what happens. The protagonist, a Sumerian bowl, has been passed down over the ages, the perfect epitome of the “been it, seen it” syndrome.