How much more “gnostic” – the idea that godliness is embedded within everything – is the news that Intel is going to put a tiny radio transmitter in every chip it manufactures?From euro banknotes to prisoners on release, every object and subject will soon be embedded with some kind of communication element, trackable by a pervasive net of computers. Nelson’s point about our spiritual illiteracy is that we can react to that kind of techgnosis only with dark dreams of totalitarian nightmare. We presume that such a level of post-humanity can only lead us all to enslavement by external control. The Matrix meets 1984, on the way to The Truman Show.Is this yet another tragic example of human ingenuity reducing human autonomy, the snake of our rationalist intelligence eating its own tail? Or is it a genuine failure of imagination – a paranoid presumption that this increasingly dense web of humans and machines will reduce our potential, rather than a faith that we can shape these systems to generate endless new possibilities?It’s fascinating that the figure of the cyborg pops up at the end of Empire, the current bestselling anti-capitalist tome from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt – a book that has put the wind back in the sails of the left, through its faith that technology will liberate the minds and souls of the worker.

That can happen, say Negri and Hardt, only when the worker embraces the soft machines of the information age and admits that the age of alienation is truly over. Networks and computers can extend our subjectivity, as well as turn us into objects.Though it has come too late for her book, Nelson would recognise the transcendental impulse in Empire, its invocations of “irrepressible joy” and its advocacy of the radical piety of St Francis of Assisi. They are kindred visionaries.Back down in the foothills of polite writing, a few sections in Wood’s book begin to rise from the general trainspotting She writes about Wolfgang Von Kempelen’s chess-player. In this great ruse played on late-18th-century Europe, a giant wooden “Turk” defeated chess masters across the continent, with a real human player secreted within its bowels. Noting that the operators often went mad, Wood neatly asks: “Can a machine think? Only, you might say, if a man relinquishes the ability to think… In the game of artificial intelligence, the only true loser might be human reason.”Jean Baudrillard might counter with his own aphorism, that “the problem with artificial intelligence is that there is not enough artifice in it.” One searches in vain for moments when Wood’s doughty research may embolden her to a few flights of theory.It has been done: Sadie Plant’s scintillating Zeros and Ones combined close documentation of the career of Eva Babbage with the most original speculations about the cyborg condition.

But, as Nelson says, “We get into trouble when we expect the empirical to do the work of the transcendental.” Too much humanity can spoil a book about post-humanity something rotten. Pat Kane’s ‘The Play Ethic: living creatively in the new century’ will appear this year from Macmillan. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the job of “firemen” is to start fires, and their mission is to annihilate millions of unwanted, troublesome books. In the parallel universe of Double Fold, the job of “librarians” is to destroy libraries – and their mission, to annihilate millions of unwanted, troublesome books. Alas, Nicholson Baker is writing not science fiction, but contemporary cultural history.A pernickety New Englander known for his torrential books about tiny things, Baker is the Tolstoy of trivia; the Proust of pedantry. In his fiction, he can spend an entire volume on the buzz of thought and sensation that surrounds a lift journey (The Mezzanine) or a baby’s feeding-time (Room Temperature).

His absurdly methodical venture into pornography (in The Fermata) may have you dreaming of the erotic excitements of the telephone directory. As a critic, he finished an obsessive study of John Updike (U and I) even though he had read only a handful of his idol’s books.
Now this maestro of minutiae turns his unblinking gaze on the post-war history of great public and university libraries. What vexes him above all is their headlong rush to dump allegedly “fragile” printed books and bound periodicals and replace them with newer storage formats: first microfilm, then diskettes, and now digital scans accessible on- line. After 270 pages of fizzing tirades against such practices, Baker caps his polemic with 60 pages of notes and 20 more of bibliography.At the very least, a reader might be tempted to agree with the owner of a firm that buys discarded volumes of newspapers from libraries to slice them up into “historic” birthday gifts “Don’t be distressed,” he tells Baker.