About the Author

Margaret Wertheim is a science journalist and commentator and author of the book Pythagoras' Trousers.

Reviews

Science journalist Wertheim (Pythagoras' Trousers, Norton, 1997) explores the concept of cyberspace as a repository for spiritual yearning, suggesting that it returns humankind to a medieval cosmological position. That position dictates that we possess a physical space of body, and a metaphysical space (i.e., cyberspace) that many individuals hope will serve as a new space for the soul. She traces the history of space beginning with the cosmology of Dante. Her journey continues through the historical foundations of celestial space, relativistic space, hyperspace, and, finally, cyberspace. While there are many who believe in the transcendent potential of cyberspace, Wertheim suggests that cyberspace lacks the necessary moral dimension for such potential to be realized, leading the reader to question whether cyberspace can have any actual redemptive significance. Instead, she says, cyberspace may serve simply as a metaphor for community, bound together by networks of relationships. For an informed audience, this is a provocative, if somewhat esoteric, study of space in its many conceptual forms.ÄJoe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago

In this serious and intriguing, if far-fetched, study, Wertheim (Pythagoras' Trousers) argues that cyberspace gives us "a technological substitute for the Christian space of Heaven." She explains that early Christians hoped to trade "the troubled material world" for the next one, where bodies would be perfected or disappear and "injustice and squalor" would vanish. Internet partisans make similar claims: in cyberspace everyone's equal and nobody's ugly. Christian theology, as espoused by medieval art and literature, imagined a place for bodies (this world) and a place for minds and souls (the next world). But modern science and modern thought (the Renaissance invention of perspective; Copernicus, Newton, Einstein) have explained and demystified physical space, leaving "no place more special than any other," nowhere for us to imagine that souls can be. Wertheim discusses hopeful fictions of "hyperspace," from H.G. Wells to Cubism to Star Wars, before turning (in chapter 6) to the Net, whose denizens‘especially users of MUDS (multiple-user dungeons)‘have, she contends, found a space for the soul online. This is, she adds, cause for both celebration and worry, since the "cyber-utopians" haven't found a clear way to make cyberspace stand (as Heaven did) for an ethics. Wertheim is intent on explaining the Net's meanings, not its workings. If her book belongs to one particular field, it's the minuscule‘but mushrooming‘one in which literary and cultural critics consider Net phenomena. As such, it's both provocative and worthwhile. (Apr.)